Current
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, by Shannon Chakraborty
Conversion, by Al Ewing et al
Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu
Last books finished
All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison
The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse
Kinda, by Frank Collins
De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout
Next books
Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road, by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson
DOOM 94, by Janis Jonevs
Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch
Second paragraph of third chapter:
‘What the devil…?’ the Judge demands, springing out of bed like a suddenly switched on fountain. ‘Why is that ruddy Gulgul cavorting about naked in my garden like a sturdy gazelle?’
I hugely enjoyed Anuja Chauhan’s story of an Indian parliamentary by-election, Battle for Bittora, when I read it in 2014. As a respite from Hugos last month, I sought out her top book on Goodreads, Those Pricey Thakur Girls, and devoured it fairly quickly. Romance novels are not my usual fare, but sometimes it’s good to have a change.
To my surprise, though published in 2013, the book is firmly set in a specific few months of 1988, with a major subplot being the male love interest’s attempts to hold a government minister accountable for the deadly pogrom against Delhi’s Sikhs in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination four years before. This is grim stuff for a romantic comedy, and I felt that the author did it justice.
Otherwise, it’s a nicely observed comedy of manners, as the fourth of Judge Thakur’s five beautiful daughters, newly hired as a TV newsreader on India’s main evening bulletin, navigates her romantic destiny, finding her backbone as well as her love. There is a healthy dose of political scepticism too, but the main thrust of the humour is in the character observation.
No actual sex on page (unlike Battle for Bittora) but lots of more than significant glances and fragile egos needing any support they can get. I didn’t like it as much as Battle for Bittora, but then I liked Battle for Bittora a great deal. You can get Those Pricey Thakur Girls here.
Not surprisingly, an easy Bechdel pass, with the two youngest sisters discussing how to get smart for a TV appearance in the middle of the first chapter.
The novel is in English, but the 2015 TV series based on it is in Hindi and you can find every single one of the 150 episodes on Youtube. (Five 25-minute episodes every week for more than six months! Phew!) Here’s the trailer.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I do not like the London Underground. I do not like the noise of the tracks, the rush of warm air that heralds the approaching train, the throngs of people, the brush of synthetic clothing on my hand as someone passes too close. I do not normally use the London Underground, but the AutoBus will not be an efficient mode of transport at this time of day, so I am given no choice.
I really enjoyed this story of AI and dating algorithms, but I did not push it for the Clarke shortlist let alone the award – plotwise, it’s obvious what is going to happen from a very early stage, and it does indeed duly happen. I enjoyed the ride but I won’t claim it as Great Literature. A really nice palate-cleanser. You can get it here.
My cousin Wick Hoffmann has done a lovely write-up of the life of his grandfather, my great-great-uncle Morris Shallcross Wickersham (1872-1962). A lot of it is just family detail of interest only to us relatives, but there was one point that jumped out at me from Morris’s diary for 1952, when at the age of 80 he flew across the Atlantic for the second time, to visit his sister Lily in London and his niece, my grandmother Dorothy Whyte, in Northern Ireland. (The image is of Wick’s transcript of his grandfather’s notes.)
The first thing that jumped out at me was the price of an air ticket from New York to London – $395 single, $711 return. Today’s dollar prices are generally a bit more, but it’s only a couple of years ago since those numbers were comfortably within the lower end of the cost of a transatlantic flight. But for 1952, those prices are massive; the inflation calculator tells me that the $395 single is $4,650 in 2024 prices, and the $711 return is $8,300. Luckily Morris’s sister Lily was very rich and could cover the cost.
The fare for a flight from Morris’s local airport in Erie, Pennsylvania, to New York was initially quoted to him as $17.42, which equates to $204 in 2024. It would be impossible to do that flight now. At present, Erie is serviced only by American Airlines, and the only flights out of the airport go to Charlotte, North Carolina, so if you want to fly from Erie to New York you have to detour 900 km to the south. Prices start at $220.
In fact he ended up going to New York by train, paying $32.83, which is $384 today. The trip took nine and a half hours (and presumably he had a sleeper or equivalent). Today you’d pay $65, but the trip takes 11 hours and there is no overnight option.
The transatlantic flight experience sounds pretty gruelling. His first flight was cancelled after he had arrived in New York, so he went home again. On his second flight, the first leg took him from New York to “Labrador” (which must mean Gander, Newfoundland), leaving at 5pm and arriving at 10pm, a three and a half hour journey allowing for time differences. That would be even worse today – there are no direct flights from New York these days, and you have to change in Montreal.
Then the passengers were stuck in a military barracks in Newfoundland, sleeping in dormitories, for two days when their plane had to turn back after it developed engine trouble. Morris is surprisingly positive about this experience – I guess that the Canadian ground staff made a special effort for the stranded octogenarian.
Finally the flight took off at 9.15pm Labrador time, two days late, and landed in London at 6.15pm the next evening. That’s fourteen and a half hours, though that surely includes time taken for refuelling at Shannon Airport. The Pan Am ticket he had originally booked would have been quicker, leaving New York at 3pm and landing in London at 11.05am the next day, just over fifteen hours in total. I guess it skipped either Gander or Shannon.
You’ll note that amidst the travel detail, Morris notes on 21 May that he had given up smoking. This was neither the first nor the last time that he made such a note in his diary!
One other point of wider interest: during Morris’s previous trip to England and Ireland, in 1950, he notes the following for October 14th:
John Whyte and I went to Stamford bridge stadium to a football game between Chelsea (the home team) and Tottenham Hotspurs, Tottenham won 2 to 0. about 70,000 people attended. We got home at 5 P.M. This stadium seats 65,000 people we with thousands of others had to stand.
I was fascinated by this because I have never thought of my father (Morris’s great-nephew, then aged 22 and an Oxford postgraduate student) as much of a football fan. In fact it was a rather significant match. The win at Stamford Bridge on 14 October was Spurs’ third win in a row, and their first away win in London of the season, an important proof of concept of manager Arthur Rowe’s “push-and-run” strategy. Spurs had only just been promoted from the Second Division, after winning it in 1949-50. They went on to win the First Division for the first time in 1950-51, also the first time that any club had won the two divisions in successive years, and in retrospect the Chelsea match was the turning point in their fortunes after a shaky start to the season.
The total attendance is recorded as 65,992, so I suspect that if the capacity of the stadium was really 65,000, there were hundreds rather than thousands standing. (But they included 78-year-old Morris!)
It’s the first sunny and warm Saturday of the year, and the rest of the family all had other plans, and also I discovered that I had missed half a dozen megaliths to the east of us in my previous explorations of Belgium’s prehistoric heritage. So I recruited H, once again my partner in crime, and we spent the day exploring them.
The big news is that over at Wéris, where I have been a couple of times previously, a new alignment of standing stones has been discovered, excavated and re-erected, giving an intensified sense of the sacred landscape of the town. I’m glad to say that it is in the same linear arrangement as most of the known Wéris monuments. This was the fourth of the seven new places (to me) that we visited, so it’s halfway down this page.
Holsteen
(50.996000N 5.417000E)
The very first rock that we visited is the Holsteen, in an attractive park in Zonhoven, northeast of Hasselt and northwest of Genk. The setting is lovely, but the stone itself a little disappointing despite its size; it appears to be a natural outcrop, which was however used by Stone Age humans for sharpening their tools.
The Devil’s Stones of Langerlo
(50.945160N 5.498960E)
On the other side of Genk, these are a little more exciting, two of them aligned with a rather ugly flower pot, and a Christian chapel in the background:
And a third a bit farther off at the other end of the green.
The Devil’s Dolmen
(50.601360N 5.666010E)
Next was a long drive south to Fléron on the outskirts of Liège, for what was frankly the least impressive thing we saw today; some rather small overgrown rocks at the base of a steep slope.
Someone had shoved a brick inside it, and it had a bit of a Stone’enge vibe, as in Spın̈al Tap.
The Danthine Alignment (and Wéris)
(50.325970N 5.516960E)
On the other hand, the entire day’s trip was justified by the new alignment of standing stones at Wéris. These were discovered a couple of years ago, and re-erected last year; they had been buried in the 16th or 17th century, presumably as part of the fight against superstition. They’re a spectacular addition to the already well-endowed spiritual geography of the location.
Still photos don’t give a really good sense of the alignment, so here’s a blustery video.
It was H’s first visit to Wéris, so we had to also visit the two big dolmens, both within easy walking distance of the new alignment with is directly between them. Here’s Wéris I, in photographs taken today and in 2009:
And the dolmen and nearby menhirs at Wéris II.
Great Stone of Ellemelle
(50.464000N 5.432000E)
The Great Stone of Ellemelle is either a fallen menhir or a dolmen with its legs knocked out. Stark and alone in a field far from anywhere, it’s pretty big but doesn’t have much to say.
Menhir du Grand Bois (Jehay Castle)
(50.575688N 5.323281E)
The second last of today’s stones has been transferred to the formal gardens of Jehay Castle, whose owner, Count Van den Steen, married one of the last heiresses of the Marquesses of Ormond, and left it to the Belgian state on his death in 1999. The building is undergoing refurbishment but is spectacular.
The menhir itself is regarded as of dubious authenticity by experts, but is nicely presented for what it is.
There are numerous statues in the grounds, all I think by Count Van den Steen himself. This nymph is particularly striking:
Time was pressing, so we did not give the castle the attention it deserved, but I’ll definitely go back some time – only 5 euro for entry (and just 2.50 if you are only doing the gardens).
The Stone of Saint-Gitter
(50.746175N 5.063662E)
B lives in the vicinity of the last stone of the trip and joined us for that part of the itinerary, and in fact I realised that I had brought her to the site in 2010 without noticing that there was a menhir there too. The site combines a tumulus with a small museum showing the Merovingian palace of Pepin the Elder, who was Charlemagne’s great-great-great-grandfather and therefore probably an ancestor of yours too, if you are of European descent.
The Stone of Saint Gitter has been moved to a corner of the museum, and B enjoyed the feel of it against her tummy and also liked watching the shadown of her fingers on the rock surface.
On the way back, we took her to the Chapel of the Holy Cross, where as usual she enjoyed lighting a candle.
So, in summary, Wéris remains a key Belgian attraction; Jehay is worth a return visit; and some day I’ll find time to go to the Sint-Gitter museum when it is open. Thanks to H (and B in her own way) for travelling companionship.
Second paragraph of chapter Three:
‘Mollie, Mollie, Mr McCrimmon has been kidnapped. It means the end of us unless we can find him quickly!’
I wrote at length about the TV story, John Peel’s novelisation and Simon Guerrier’s Black Archive on it just over two years ago; however I’m coming back to it now because Frazer Hines, who starred as Jamie in the original show, has produced an alternative novelisation, assisted by Mike Tucker and Steve Cole. The authors have taken the step of the framing narrative of the second (and last) showing the the TV story in 1968, when newly acquired companion Zoe was invited to watch it as an example of the Doctor’s previous adventures.
Is there a point? Yes, I think so; John Peel in his novelisation was trying to make sense of Dalek mythology in the context of the show as a whole, whereas here we have Hines and co-writers humanising the experiences of both Jamie and Victoria, giving a lot more back-story to the companions and indeedto the other characters.
One of the problems I have with The Evil of the Daleks is that quite a lot of the plot doesn’t really make sense. But the TV story keeps you entertained with the pace of events, and this novelisation does the same, from a slightly different direction to John Peel’s. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail, as is the TV story. (Some argue that Ruth Maxtible telling Mollie to get some tea at the end of episode 2 crosses the Bechdel threshold, but this is incorrect, because the tea is for Jamie.)
Second paragraph of third chapter:
After all that wild splendour, it’s an odd jolt to find himself in Victoria in those tamed and pretty streets. There are Englishmen everywhere; he steps out of the train and the accents of his homeland surround him. He could stay here for a while he thinks.
It has time-travelling, and a plot that turns out to make sense. I wasn’t really into it at first, but loved the ending. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Justin’s family background was conventional. He had one sister, four years older than him. Her name was Amanda. Her friends called her Mandy, but Justin and his parents invariably called her Amanda. His father’s name was Mortimer, and his mother was Nicole. Their names for each other were Mort and Nicky.
A weird little jewel at the end of Christopher Priest’s writing career, this book’s protagonist, a film student who grows up to be a film critic, becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a Hollywood film star at Heathrow Airport in 1948. There’s a lot of exploration of film history and of airports and the human process of flight, and although I worked out what had happened to the actress some time before the characters did, there was more than enough momentum to keep me going. Like most of Priest’s books, this one will set your mind racing rather than your pulse. A decent note to end on. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail, I think. Most of the book is tight-third to the male protagonist. There are a couple of scenes where his girlfriend is talking to an older actress, but he is present and in the conversation too.
Second paragraph of third chapter;
I have never understood why people would rather attempt to open conversations with strangers when they could be quiet instead.
I loved her first book, Memory of Water, and was on the Clarke jury when it was shortlisted in 2015. But I found this less engaging. Single-note emotionally, and the means and motivation of the eco-terrorists not very well explained in the end. (I also noticed repeated mentions of feline ears!) You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
He was at a cheap, unstable table barely held together by rusty nails and the efforts of a unskilled carpenter. A half-eaten bowl of pepper soup, a mostly eaten plate of suya, and three tall, brown, empty bottles of Gulder beer were sloppily spread in front of him like reluctant offerings. Everything around him vibrated, including his own head, pulsating with the loud music and the rising rush of alcohol. Up on the makeshift stage, where a yellow-painted board spelled out the words: Fela Kuti and the Africa 70 in dark blue letters, a thin, shirtless man in tight trousers with chalk markings on his face sang into the microphone while simulating sex with a sweaty, skinny woman in a gold miniskirt and bra, cowrie shell bangles shaking around her ankles and wrists. Fela’s voice strained as he sang in pidgin.
There is probably a whole subgenre out there of books about stealing items from the British museum. The only other one I have read is a Lovejoy novel, The Very Last Gambado. Both Lovejoy and the protagonist here, Shigidi, arbitrate between their own homelands and cultures (East Anglia and Nigeria respectively) and the symbolic centre of imperial cultural theft, the British Museum, and obviously we cheer for the insurgents both times.
It’s a richly imagined, sexy contemporary magical world, with the metaphors about colonialism and cultural appropriation text rather than subtext; and the sense of place is very good in both Nigeria and London. Entertaining to see Aleister Crowley still alive and taking an interest in contemporary affairs. I did feel that the system of magic and godhood was rather over-bureaucratised, using frankly Western concepts of management which are good for the 21st century in Nigeria or England but would hardly have been around for the millennia! Still, enjoyable and short, and you can get it here.
Bechdel fail, I think. Shigidi’s main accomplice is a succubus called Nneoma, but I don’t thik she speaks to another woman without him being present and in the conversation.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
A straggle of year twos darts past like startled fish, first one way, then the other. Did I ever run like that? It’s hard to imagine. My body is calcifying; with every failed conception it grows more inert. Sometimes, it feels as if I’ve been dropped down a very deep well, and I’m lying there, watching the clouds roll past, listening to the far-off lives of others.
I enjoyed this. A really well depicted moral and personal dilemma which is not too far from today’s tech. The threat to the protagonist and her family is as much from the legacy of her own choices as from external bigotry. Raised my eyebrow a bit at a world where laboratories in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia routinely collaborate, but sometimes there are things in novels that are not true. You can get it here.
Current
De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout
The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse
All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison
Last books finished
Paradise Towers, by John Toon
Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham
Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks
Next books
Kinda, by Frank Collins
Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Second frame of third installment:
Second in the sequence of Titan Eleventh Doctor comics, continuing his adventures with recently bereaved London librarian Alice, anonymous musician Jones and chameleon entity ARC. Alice is much more interesting than the other two and gets much more plot, especially when her dead mother appears to come back. The standout however is the first episode where time starts running backwards – this has been done a couple of times before in Who, but it’s difficult to do well and it is carried off with aplomb. You can get it here.
Bechdel fail. When Alice meets her resurrected mother, they talk about the Doctor. There is a flashback scene to Alice’s childhood, but it’s not a dialogue.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
John had no siblings. And he had grown up sterile, thanks to a gene-warfare attack on London when he was a boy. So Sarah was precious to the whole extended family – and had always seemed especially so to John, otherwise introverted, emotionally undeveloped. Or so even his wife, Sarah, found him.
I found a cache of last year’s Clarke submissions which I did read at the time but had’t yet written up here, so here is a sequence of short posts to clear them from my unblogged list.
I thought the slowly disappearing world sequences in The Thousand Earths were really fantastic. Gave me nightmares. The sequences involving the protagonist, however, seemed to me to be a very slow way of getting us to the place where he needed to be. I can forgive it for the other bits though. And I am glad that sex will still be a thing in the far future!
Hugos have been a distraction – I read fewer books this month than in any month since March 2019 and March 2017, the two previous times that I was supervising the close of Hugo nominations as Administrator.
Non-fiction 4 (YTD 15)
Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, by Isabel Hardman
Ex Marginalia: Essays from the Edges of Speculative Fiction, ed. Chinuo Onwualu
A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan
Paradise Towers, by John Toon
Non-genre 2 (YTD 11)
Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Those Pricey Thakur Girls, by Anuja Chauhan
SF 4 (YTD 15)
Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, by Wole Talabi
Airside, by Christopher Priest
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 4)
Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines
Doctor Who – Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt
Comics 1 (YTD 6)
Serve You, by Al Ewing, Rob Williams et al 
3,200 pages (YTD 13,700)
6/13 (YTD 22/54) by non-male writers (Hardman, Onwualu, Speller/Allan, Howard, Chauhan, Butler)
3/13 (YTD 6/41) by a non-white writer (Onwualu, Chauhan, Talabi)
1/13 rereads (Doctor Who – Paradise Towers)
321 books currently tagged unread, up 12 from last month (thanks to shortlists and Eastercon purchases), down 74 from March 2023.
Reading now
De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout
The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse
All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison, by Niall Harrison
Coming soon (perhaps)
Doctor Who: Kinda, by Terrance Dicks
Kinda, by Frank Collins
Return, by Simon Fraser et al
Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu
DOOM 94, by Janis Jonevs
Ara Guler’s Istanbul: 40 Years of Photographs
The Return of Marco Polo’s World, by Robert Kaplan
Moroda, by L.L. McNeil
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch
The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
When the Moon Was Ours, by Anna-Marie McLemore
When Voiha Wakes, by Joy Chant
Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray
Casting Off, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse
The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt
“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge”, by Mike Resnick
The Sol Majestic, by Ferrett Steinmetz
L’Affaire Tournesol, by Hergé
The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless
The Wonderful Visit, by H. G. Wells
Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse
Hard to be a God, by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
It is ten years ago this month that I first posted what has now become a regular habit – the second paragraph of the third chapter of every book that I read. (which needs a bit of wiggle room for comics, plays and most poetry.) I have found that it often gives a brief (sometimes not so brief) flavour of the book as a whole, and of course it proves that I did read beyond the first two chapters.
The very first book that I gave this treatment to was Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice; the second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I unrolled the bundle of clothes I had bought for her— insulated underclothes, quilted shirt and trousers, undercoat and hooded overcoat, gloves— and laid them out. Then I took her chin and turned her head toward me. “Can you hear me?”
I did it for the month of March 2014, then dropped it for two years, then picked it up again in March 2016 with Mother of Eden by Chris Beckett, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:
I was already sitting there when my cousin Dixon came over to me. About half the Kneefolk had already arrived, and the others were coming in.
I think I must have checked the second paragraph of the third chapter of well over 2,000 books by now. I got the idea from my dear friend H, who had spontaneously adopted it as one of the data points of comparison between Lifeblood, by N.J. Cooper, and Book of Souls, by Glenn Cooper, neither of which I have personally read.
My experience is that it’s rather a variable measure in terms of getting the sense of a book. It’s more likely to work for non-fiction than for fiction, simply because with fiction books there is always the risk that the second paragraph of the third chapter will be a single word of dialogue, for instance with the Doctor Who novel Illegal Alien, by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry:
“Breakfast?”
Or The Chosen Twelve, by James Breakwell:
”Alpha.”
On the other hand, the longest I can recall, over 500 words in both English translation and the original Spanish, was from Luis Leante’s See How Much I Love You. I won’t copy it here.
Sometimes the paragraph neatly illustrates how bad the writing is; for example, The Hunt – For Allies by David Geoffrey Adams:
Anders Johannsen, captain of the first human starship, tossed and turned in bed trying to find the sleep he so desperately needed, after days of insomnia and stress. Losing the battle as the shouts of his bridge crew reverberated through his mind.
or Prophets of the Red Night, by Sophie McKeand:
REbooT// extension 31592 examine examine R3FORMAT / critical warning / critical thought processes are superseding agreed parameters. Exit thought – enter sleep. REbooT// Error close > > 56129
Where I read a book in translation, I try and dig out the original, for instance in Johanna Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown / Troll: A Love Story:
| Se ei tunnu sairaalta, ei ollenkaan, vaikka sen turkki pölisee jatkuvasti synkeänä pilvenä Electroluxin letkussa. | He doesn’t seem ill at all, though the shreds of his coat are a dismal sight in the Electrolux [vacuum cleaner]. |
Sometimes this leads to discoveries: the English translation of Waste Tide, by Chen Qiufan (who I met in Paris in November; he has rebranded as Stanley Chen) turns out to have rearranged the text so that the second paragraph of the third chapter in the Chinese original is some way into the third chapter in English.
If there are footnotes, I like to include them as well, including all seven footnotes to the second paragraph of the third chapter of Brian Griffin’s Cycling in Victorian Ireland:
2 Thom’s Irish Almanac and Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland: for the Year 1869 (Dublin: Alexander Thom, 1869), p.1400; Irish Cyclist, 26 March 1890.
3 Irish Wheelman, 25 September 1894.
4 Irish Cyclist, 7 May 1890.
5 Icycles, December 1880; Irish Cyclist, 21 May 1890, 2 July 1890. William Bindon Blood was the club president; William Persse Blood was its secretary, and Louis Meldon, — a solicitor, and brother of Dr Austin Meldon — was its captain.
6 Irish Cyclist, 11 June 1890. For accounts of the Dublin University Bicycle Club and of cycling at Trinity College Dublin in the nineteenth century see Kenneth Bailey, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1892-1945 (Dublin:The University Press, 1947), pp 130-33, 164; Trevor West, ‘Football, Athletics and Cycling: The Role of Trinity College, Dublin in the Evolution of Irish Sport’ in Sarah Alyn Stacey (ed), Essays on Heroism in Sport in Ireland and France (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003), pp 141-142.
7 Bicycling News, 20 September 1878.
8 Morning Mail, 14 September
For comics, I take either the second frame of the first page of the third chapter if it’s a work with chapters, or the second frame of the third page if it’s a more unitary text. I can vary this if necessary as with Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir where I used both the second and third frames of the third page.
With comics it’s generally a bit more hit and miss than with prose. By the third page, the story is barely getting going. Though sometimes it works; here’s the second frame of the third chapter of Jaren van de Olifant, by Willy Linthout, whose protagonist is coming to terms with his son’ suicide:
It can be difficult to make it work for poetry, but sometimes you are lucky, as with Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist:
The floor was mouse-grey, smooth, chilly concrete.
There were no windows, just two narrow shafts
Of gilded motes, crossing, from air-holes slit
High in each gable. The one door meant no draughts
Plays and scripts are much more difficult, and after some unsatisfactory initial experimentation I’m now just giving the opening of the third scene. I make an honourable exception for Christopher Marlowe, who is usually pithy, for instance in The Jew of Malta:
ABIGAIL: Now have I happily espied a time
To search the plank my father did appoint;
And here, behold, unseen, where I have found
The gold, the pearls, and jewels, which he hid.
ACHATES: Why stands my sweet Æneas thus amaz’d?
At the end of 2021 I did a roundup of the second paragraphs of the third chapters of (most of) the books I had read so far that year. I might do the same again this year (the two years in between got complicated by Clarke submissions, some of which I have yet to post notes on here). I’ll finish this post with my top C3P2 from that selection, a sad little story from A Buzz in the Meadow by Dave Goulson:
From a very young age I kept newts and common toads in tanks in my bedroom, and this went atypically well. The toads in particular made great pets, seemingly taking to captivity and providing great entertainment by hoovering up mealworms with their extending, sticky tongues. When I grew bored of them, or ran out of mealworms from the supply that I bred in a box under my bed, I could simply release the toads back into the garden. However, I longed to have some more exotic amphibians, and eventually I badgered my parents into buying me a pair of North American leopard frogs for Christmas: attractive, bright-green frogs with (as you might guess from the name) a profusion of black spots. I filled one of my glass fish tanks with piles of stones, peat, some plants and a small pond, to make an attractive home for them. It looked great and the frogs settled in well, but after just a few weeks their energetic hopping about caused one of the piles of stones to topple; I came home from school one day to find them both squashed.
Poor frogs!
As you may be aware, we launched the Hugo ballot earlier today.
Having had a certain amount of foreknowledge, I crunched the numbers for the Goodreads and LibraryThing raters in several categories last weekend, and came up with the following stats. This is of course no more than a reflection of the tastes of the user base on both systems; it may (or may not) be useful to assess how far each of the finalists has penetrated the market.
| Best Novel | Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||
| Title | raters | rating | owners | rating |
| The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi, Shannon Chakraborty | 37750 | 4.3 | 1077 | 4.34 |
| Starter Villain, John Scalzi | 34356 | 4.2 | 772 | 4.05 |
| Witch King, Martha Wells | 14651 | 3.72 | 888 | 3.78 |
| Translation State, Ann Leckie | 8360 | 4.13 | 444 | 4.2 |
| Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh | 6789 | 4.06 | 463 | 4.08 |
| The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera | 1346 | 3.72 | 160 | 3.48 |
| Best Novella | Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||
| Title | raters | rating | owners | rating |
| Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher | 20078 | 4.05 | 543 | 4.14 |
| The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older | 4833 | 3.66 | 279 | 3.84 |
| Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo | 3704 | 4.27 | 148 | 4.36 |
| Rose/House, Arkady Martine | 1548 | 3.8 | 97 | 3.46 |
| (Adventures in Space: New Short stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers) | 22 | 3.41 | 2 | – |
| Best Graphic Story or Comic | Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||
| Title | raters | rating | owners | rating |
| Saga, Vol. 11 | 4456 | 4.26 | 132 | 4.02 |
| Bea Wolf | 2234 | 3.46 | 204 | 4.15 |
| Shubeik Lubeik / Your Wish Is My Command | 2531 | 4.52 | 127 | 4.41 |
| Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons | 858 | 4.5 | 64 | 4.35 |
| The Witches of World War II | 158 | 3.09 | 17 | 2.64 |
| 三体漫画：第一部 / The Three Body Problem, Part One | – | – | – | – |
| Best Related Work | Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||
| Title | raters | rating | owners | rating |
| A City on Mars, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith | 2070 | 4.12 | 211 | 4.24 |
| The Culture: The Drawings, Iain M. Banks | 54 | 4 | 47 | 3.36 |
| A Traveller in Time, Maureen Kincaid Speller | 6 | 4.5 | 6 | – |
| All These Worlds, Niall Harrison | 4 | 4 | 5 | – |
| 中国科幻口述史, 第二卷, 第三卷 / Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, vols 2 and 3 杨枫 / Yang Feng | – | – | – | – |
| 雨果X访谈 (Discover X), 王雅婷 (Tina Wong) | (video interviews) | |||
| Lodestar Award for Best YA Book | Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||
| Title | raters | rating | owners | rating |
| The Sinister Booksellers of Bath, Garth Nix | 4948 | 4.06 | 310 | 3.91 |
| To Shape A Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose | 4866 | 4.19 | 251 | 4.15 |
| Unraveller, Frances Hardinge | 2167 | 4.12 | 157 | 4.08 |
| Abeni’s Song, by P. Djèlí Clark | 380 | 3.97 | 50 | 4.00 |
| Promises Stronger than Darkness, Charlie Jane Anders | 313 | 4.21 | 49 | 3.94 |
| Liberty’s Daughter, Naomi Kritzer | 198 | 4.12 | 41 | 4.11 |
As I said, this number-crunching has proved a good guide to the outcome rather less than half the time in the past; so I take it as I find it.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
It was being a thoroughly grown-up evening, and she [Clary] didn’t want him [Archie}to think that she didn’t know about conversation – particularly as Polly wasn’t helping at all: she simply smiles and chose things to eat and ate them. She looked awfully pretty in a pale yellow dress with a lace collar and a little black taffeta bow with streamers.
Third in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brilliant family saga of the Cazalets, set during the Second World War, with the young and middle-aged women who are the central characters falling in love and having plenty of (off-stage) sex, not always with the right people or the same people. I almost feel that we had 900 pages of set-up in the first two volumes, which then explodes into lots and lots of plot here, which is maybe a little unfair as the first two were hardly without incident. Howard’s own gruesome first marriage (to Peter Scott) is unsparingly mined for material, with two particularly memorable passages involving very small babies.
Along with the turbulent love lives of the various viewpoint figures, there are some gems of observation about women’s roles in the society of 1940s England, and a quietly devastating subplot about the Holocaust and the uncovering of the concentration camps. Howard is tremendous at showing a society on the verge of tremendous change – mostly of course from the viewpoint of the privileged, but you write about what you know. And again there is an unlooked-for twist at the end which has my appetite whetted for the fourth volume.
This is not a fast-paced series, but I’m hugely enjoying it. You can get Confusion here.
Easy Bechdel pass – in the first chapter Polly and Clary talk about the afterlife and Polly’s dead mother.
I also listened to the middle part of the excellent BBC radio adaptation, which went out as a series of fifteen-minute episodes in 2013 (ten for each of the five books). The BBC moved around some of the internal narrative – the lesbian subplot is much earlier, and the twist at the end signalled much more in advance – but it’s faithful to the spirit of the original. Everyone is good but I was particularly impressed with Alix Wilton Regan, playing Louise, the character closest to Elizabeth Jane Howard herself. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third essay (“Oja Oyingbo: Centering the Fringes”, by Ayọ̀délé Ọlọ́fintúádé)
My grandfather was the best of them, a wonderful storyteller who wove tales from Ifa with the contemporary. Not only was he a storyteller, he read widely and had a library full of rare books and literature from the Far East. It was in his library that I read my first works of speculative fiction in Yoruba. They were a series of textbooks titled Aláwìíyé (1-6), written by J.F. Odunjo, and the novels of D.O. Fágúnwà, which he made me read aloud because he was visually impaired. It wasn’t until I turned thirteen and gained access to my brother’s library of erotica that I encountered speculative fiction from the Global North.
Back at the start of this month, I foolishly thought that I might be able to get through all of the BSFA finalists for Best Novel and Best Non-Fiction (Long) before voting closes on Saturday. Well, I forgot just how much time the Hugos absorb at close of nominations – and this year was special for several reasons – so I didn’t get very far down either list. However I had a strong start with this collection of essays about SF seen from the perspective of the formerly colonised.
The 21 essays here are all very short, but I learned a lot from them. About half of them are about Nigeria, which is fair enough considering its regional and linguistic dominance. But the standout for me was “Writing Outside the Frame: A Homeland Called Palestine”, by Ibtisam Azem, which briefly but very eloquently puts the case for a society under threat of literal erasure. Much to think about. You can get it here.
Current
De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout
Sleepers of Mars, by John Wyndham
The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse
All These Worlds, by Niall Harrison
Last books finished
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan
Doctor Who – Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt
Next books
Doctor Who: Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt
Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Once upon a time, your constituency was just the seat whose name you bore when you spoke in the Chamber. MPs could get away with barely visiting the seat they represented in Westminster. Duncan Sandys, MP for Streatham and Norwood on and off between 1935 and 1974, boasted of his annual trips over the river to visit it. Winston Churchill rarely visited his constituencies either.
An interesting and gloomy reflection on the deficiencies of the British political system by a close observer.
I knew a fair amount of this, having hung around with politicians for most of my career, but there were some things I had not really thought of before – the sheer economic cost of running for parliament, putting your life on hold for a desperate contest that you may not win, and the toll that serving as an MP puts on your family life and mental and physical health, are really extreme. The path to Westnminster is a grim and terrible winnowing process which rules out many people who are not young-to-middle-aged men with a particular set of personality neuroses.
The interlinkage of executive and legislature then works to actively discourage good policy-making. Opposition MPs have no power at all, obviously; but most government MPs are struggling to get on the greasy pole of preferment, and therefore have no incentive to criticise, even constructively. There are a few exceptions – well known mavericks, and the chairs of Select Committees – but essentially, to make your mark in the House of Commons you need to abandon your political ambitions.
Hardman has some modest thoughts on how to improve things. She (rightly) discounts electoral reform, which was lost for at least a generation by the botched 2011 referendum. But reduction of the government payroll, and enhancement of the scrutiny powers of the Commons, could both serve to rebalance the system in a healthier way. She also discounts the complete division of the legislature and the executive, pointing at the deficiencies of the U.S. system of government; but the American way is not the only way, and Belgium, for instance, makes ministers leave parliament while remaining accountable to it.
None of this is going to happen, of course. The surgery that is needed requires either a fresh mandate from an energised reforming new government, or a carefully developed cross-party consensus that Something Must Be Done. The incoming Labour government will have many other fish to fry than constitutional tinkering; and MPs and peers at present can’t even agree on the basics of how to fix the crumbling physical infrastructure of the Palace of Westminster, let alone how to improve the way it makes laws. But if you want to get better informed, you can get this book here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018; next on that pile is The Return of Marco Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century, by Robert D. Kaplan. I should add that although I bought the 2016 edition in 2018, my Kindle edition automagically updated with the author’s comments on the May and Johnson administrations, which gave her much extra material to illustrate her arguments.
Second frame of third page:
First in a series of volumes about the loving and kinky relationship between Alison and Lisa, and Alison’s friend Alan who builds her equipment. Not especially explicit, but very sexy. You can get it here.
This is an update of my post from four years ago, 2020 will be the most geriatric U.S. presidential election ever, which was an update from my post of eight years ago, 2016 will be an unusually elderly presidential election, even by recent standards.
In 2016, the combined ages of the two front-runners in the American presidential election, at 139, was the highest ever – Donald Trump turned 70 a few months before the election, and Hillary Clinton a few months after. That was ten years more than the previous record, Reagan (73) and Mondale (56) in 1984 (total 129).
In 2020, the combined ages of the two candidates was 151 – the election was a few months after Donald Trump’s 74th birthday, and very soon before Joe Biden’s 78th. And this year, with the same two candidates, we can add another four years to each, for a total of 159, twenty more than in 2016 and thirty more than in any previous year.
Only twice before had both main candidates been over 60 – the obscure elections of 1848, when Zachary Taylor (63) beat Lewis Cass (64), and 1828 when Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams (both 61). Only three times prior to 2016 had even one candidate been over 70 – in 1984, 1996 and 2008 (all Republicans). To have both over 69 was really unprecedented back in 2016; on election day in 2024, one will be two years short of his 80th birthday and the other almost two years into his ninth decade.
In the list below, I’ve put the 18 elections since 1952 (starting with 1956) in red; the 16 elections before 1852 (ending with 1848) in blue; and the 26 elections from 1852 to 1952 inclusive in green. This year sees the 60th of the quadrennial elections, so I have grouped them in tens.
It’s clear that the middle period saw younger candidates, with those 26 elections supplying 22 of the bottom half of the table, and 4 of the top half – in fact, none of the middle 26 are in the top 30% of the table, and the high-water mark is the comparatively youthful matchup between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden in 1876. Of the seven elections where the top candidates’ combined ages totalled less than a century, the most recent was in 1960 and the second most recent in 1908.
The earlier period was also elderly, with only two elections (one of which was not really competitive) of the first 16 in the lower half. And all six elections since 2000, and all but two of the twelve elections starting with 1980 (in darker red), including 2024, are in the oldest third of the table.
2024 Trump (78) + Biden (81) = 159
2020 Biden (77) + Trump (74) = 151
2016 Trump (70) + HR Clinton (69) = 139
1984 Reagan (73) + Mondale (56) = 129
1848 Taylor (63) + Cass (64) = 127
1980 Reagan (69) + Carter (56) = 125
1840 WH Harrison (67) + Van Buren (57) = 124
1996 WJ Clinton (50) + Dole (73) = 123
1956 Eisenhower (66) + Stevenson (56) = 122
1828 Jackson (61) + JQ Adams (61) = 122
1800 Jefferson (57) + J Adams (65) = 122
1832 Jackson (65) + Clay (55) =120
2008 Obama (47) + McCain (72) = 119
1988 GHW Bush (64) + Dukakis (55) = 119
1816 Monroe (58) + King (61) = 119
1808 Madison (57) + Pinckney (62) = 119
1804 Jefferson (61) + Pinckney (58) = 119
2004 GW Bush (58) + Kerry (60) = 118
1792 Washington (60) + J Adams (57) = 117 – more of an acclamation than an election
2012 Obama (51) + Romney (65) = 116
1876 Hayes (54) + Tilden (62) = 116
1844 Polk (49) + Clay (67) = 116
1836 Van Buren (53) + WH Harrison (63) = 116
1976 Carter (52) + Ford (63) = 115
1820 Monroe (62) + JQ Adams (53) = 115 – more of an acclamation than an election
1992 WJ Clinton (46) + GHW Bush (68) = 114
1952 Eisenhower (62) + Stevenson (52) = 114
1892 Cleveland (55) + B Harrison (59) = 114
1824 JQ Adams (57) + Jackson (57) = 114
1796 J Adams (61) + Jefferson (53) = 114
1916 Wilson (59) + Hughes (54) = 113
1852 Pierce (47) + Scott (66) = 113
1968 Nixon (55) + Humphrey (57) = 112
1964 Johnson (56) + Goldwater (55) = 111
1872 Grant (50) + Greeley (61) = 111
1948 Truman (64) + Dewey (46) = 110
1972 Nixon (59) + McGovern (50) = 109
1912 Wilson (55) + T Roosevelt (54) = 109
1856 Buchanan (65) + Frémont (43) = 109
1788 Washington (56) + J Adams (53) = 109 – more of an acclamation than an election
1932 FD Roosevelt (50) + Hoover (58) = 108
1928 Hoover (54) + Smith (54) = 108
2000 GW Bush (54) + Gore (52) = 106
1940 FD Roosevelt (58) + Wilkie (48) = 106
1888 B Harrison (55) + Cleveland (51) = 106
1920 Harding (55) + Cox (50) = 105
1884 Cleveland (47) + Blaine (58) = 105
1944 FD Roosevelt (62) + Dewey (42) = 104
1880 Garfield (48) + Hancock (56) = 104
1868 Grant (46) + Seymour (58) = 104
1812 Madison (61) + DW Clinton (43) = 104
1936 FD Roosevelt (54) + Landon (49) = 103
1924 Coolidge (52) + Davis (51) = 103
1908 Taft (51) + Bryan (48) = 99
1904 T Roosevelt (46) + Parker (52) = 98
1900 McKinley (57) + Bryan (40) = 97
1864 Lincoln (55) + McClellan (37) = 92
1860 Lincoln (51) + Breckinridge (39) = 90
1960 Kennedy (42) + Nixon (47) = 89
1896 McKinley (53) + Bryan (36) = 89
Note on methodology: I’ve taken candidates’ ages in whole calendar years on election day. (Which for Warren Harding was his 55th birthday, for all the good it did him.) In 1800 I count Adams (65) not Burr (44) as runner-up since that’s who voters thought they were choosing between in November. For 1872 I’ve counted Greeley (61) as losing candidate even though he died shortly after the election; most of his electoral votes went to Thomas Hendricks (53) who went on to be Tilden’s running mate in 1876 (they lost) and Cleveland’s in 1884 (they won, but Hendricks died a few months after taking office). I have not counted third or lower placed candidates at all (thus excluding incumbent President Taft in 1912, when he was 55, a year older than Theodore Roosevelt and ten months younger than Woodrow Wilson).
Incidentally the older candidate has won 34 times, and the younger 25 times. But those 34 include three elections which were really acclamations (1788, 1792 and 1820) so the fact that the Adamses were younger than Washington or Monroe doesn’t really matter (indeed, there are good grounds for excluding those elections from my list entirely). The most recent period shows a shift of fortune toward (relative) youth; of the 18 most recent elections, the younger candidate has won nine and the older also nine; the younger candidate has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections (but lost twice in the electoral college).
Henry Gassaway Davis was the Democratic Party’s candidate for Vice-President in 1904; election day was shortly before his 81st birthday. He and his presidential candidate, Alton B. Parker, lost the popular vote to Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Fairbanks by a margin of 19% in the popular vote and by 336 to 140 in the electoral college. Until this year, he was the only octogenarian candidate to have been in either top spot. (He lived another eleven and a half years.)
Quick post after running three of the Nebula final ballot categories through Goodreads and Librarything.
| Best Novel | Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||
| Title | raters | rating | owners | rating |
| Witch King, Martha Wells | 14651 | 3.72 | 888 | 3.78 |
| Translation State, Ann Leckie | 8360 | 4.13 | 444 | 4.20 |
| The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz | 4664 | 3.39 | 389 | 3.43 |
| The Water Outlaws, S.L. Huang | 1827 | 3.84 | 198 | 3.91 |
| The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera | 1346 | 3.72 | 160 | 3.48 |
| Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi | 454 | 3.74 | 66 | 3.56 |
| Best Novella | Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||
| Title | raters | rating | owners | rating |
| Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher | 20078 | 4.05 | 543 | 4.14 |
| Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee | 7310 | 3.90 | 242 | 3.95 |
| The Mimicking of Known Successes, Malka Older | 4833 | 3.66 | 279 | 3.84 |
| The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill | 5792 | 3.89 | 223 | 4.08 |
| Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo | 3704 | 4.27 | 148 | 4.36 |
| Linghun, Ai Jiang | 1301 | 4.04 | 49 | 4.40 |
| Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction | Goodreads | LibraryThing | ||
| Title | raters | rating | owners | rating |
| To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, Moniquill Blackgoose | 4866 | 4.19 | 251 | 4.15 |
| Liberty’s Daughter, Naomi Kritzer | 198 | 4.12 | 41 | 4.11 |
| The Ghost Job, Greg Van Eekhout | 57 | 3.84 | 8 | 4.00 |
| The Inn at the Amethyst Lantern, J. Dianne Dotson | 17 | 4.59 | 1 | – |
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Crouched on the other side of the bars, and still holding my hands, Nicholas Sabine gave a wry grin. ‘I know it’s not usual, Lucy, but there’s no law against it.’
I got this last autumn under the incorrect impression that it was set in Chengdu; in fact only the opening and the climax are set in China, and it’s near the fictional town of Chengfu, not the real city of Chengdu. (There is also a real Chengfu in Anhui Province, but it doesn’t fit the meagre description given.) So I put it aside, yet it bubbled to the top of my reading pile anyway. Destiny, or something.
It’s a romantic adventure story about young Lucy, abandoned in an orphanage in China, who finds herself sucked into a bizarre English feud between two neighbouring families over lost Chinese treasure. There are some vey effective fish-out-of-water moments for Lucy when she first arrives in England. The plot twists are pretty absurd, as hidden relatives turn up everywhere and Lucy returns to China to skip through the Boxer Rebellion, and yet I kept on being sucked back into it to find out what would happen next. I’m sure that the Chinese details are as wobbly as I know the English historical details are; but I admit that I was entertained anyway. You can get it here.
The author, “Madeleine Brent”, is a pseudonym for Peter O’Donnell, best known as the author of the Modesty Blaise series. I don’t think I have ever read any of them, but I might give them a try now.
Passes the Bechdel test easily in the first chapter, where Lucy is looking after the girls in the orphanage.
At the turn of the year this was my top unread non-genre book. Since then it has been way overtaken by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf.
Second paragraph of third chapter:
It is undeniable that it became convulsed with the most violent emotions directly the Young Lady in Grey appeared. It began an absolutely unprecedented Wabble—unprecedented so far as Hoopdriver’s experience went. It “showed off”—the most decadent sinuosity. It left a track like one of Beardsley’s feathers. He suddenly realised, too, that his cap was loose on his head and his breath a mere remnant.
This is one of H.G. Wells’ earliest novels, published in 1896 between The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and I think his first non-genre novel. I thought it was a little gem. The protagonist, Mr Hoopdriver, working unhappily in a draper’s shop, goes on a cycling holiday across southern England, and finds himself acting as saviour to a teenage girl who has run away from home with a much older man. Often I find Wells’ portrayal of the lower middles classes annoying and patronising, but here I felt there was enough characterisation in the portrayal of Hoopdriver and self-deprecation in Wells’ own tone that the brief story hung together perfectly well. It’s not quite up to the level of Love and Mr Lewisham, the next non-genre novel that Wells wrote, but I enjoyed it all the same. You can get it here.
It would make a lovely short film or teleplay, and I’m surprised to find that it has been adapted for the screen only once, a silent film made in 1922.
Bechdel fail. It’s told from the point of view of Mr Hoopdriver, and when the girl finally is reconciled with her stepmother, there are always men present or being talked about.
Next on my Wells list is another early one, The Wonderful Visit.
I remember watching The Sun Makers aged ten when it was first shown in late 1977. It’s not the high point of Season 15 (that would be Horror of Fang Rock) but it’s not the low point either (that would be Underworld). Even at ten, however, I could feel that the show was trying not to lose its way; I did not know of course that new producer Graham Williams was fumbling to set his mark on the show, or that Robert Holmes stepped down as script editor halfway through the story.
When I rewatched it in 2008, I wrote:
I remembered The Sunmakers from its first broadcast in 1977, but had forgotten quite how good it is. In total contrast to The Seeds of Doom, here we have the Doctor fomenting a popular uprising against an oppressive regime. There are numerous classic sf tropes – the rag-tag rebels living in the bowels of the city, the drugs in the air supply – but also a couple of Robert Holmes touches, such as the repeated digs at the British tax system. The bad guys – Gatherer Hade and the Collector – are gratifyingly over the top, but at the same time the implied violence is pretty alarming – the Doctor almost gets his brains burnt out, Leela is almost executed by public steaming, both are threatened with ugly death by the suspicious rebels, and these seem like serious threats. Indeed I seem to remember reading somewhere that at one point there was a plan for Leela to be killed off in this story, which would certainly have been a more in-character departure than what actually happened (but would have deprived us of her in the much later Gallifrey audios). It is also, and this I think is very unusual, a good story for K9: he starts and ends by beating the Doctor at chess, and takes the initiative at several crucial points during proceedings. It seems almost churlish after all that to point out that the actual setting – humanity has been forcibly displaced to Pluto as a result of fiendish capitalist exploitation – is pretty implausible even for Who, and does great violence to any attempts to construct a future history of the Whoniverse.
When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:
I have a feeling that last time I watched The Sun Makers, for some reason it was immediately after watching Underworld so it looked rather good in comparison. However, in sequence after the brilliance of Season 14 and the more modest successes of Horror of Fang Rock and Image of the Fendahl, it is pretty awful. I think I can establish several specific reasons for the awfulness, one of which was not really anyone’s fault, but the remainder of which could have been corrected.
The unchangeable factor is that the weather for the location filming was dull, so the story gets off to a tremendously dull start; it’s difficult to make the roof of a cigarette factory in Bristol look much like the top of a kilometer-high apartment block on Pluto, but it helps if the weather cooperates. I wonder if there’s also a bit of an unconscious assumption on my part that cuddly blurry film should represent contemporary Earth settings, and sharp-edged videotape the future; so the setting looks even more like Bristol than Pluto.
But the other factors were simply mistakes made by Holmes in the script and not sufficiently rounded off in the editing process. The story is simply very nasty. The rebels are really very unpleasant people, threatening to kill him and Leela; we don’t really see why the Doctor should choose to help such unlikeable (and otherwise unmemorable) individuals. The Company of course are even worse, which is OK since they are the baddies, but the attempted steaming of Leela is a really horrific prospect, much worse actually than any of the supposedly extreme violence of the previous season.
It does have its good points. The interplay between Gatherer Hade and the Collector is great fun (though again Holmes is usually smarter than to give all the good dialogue to the villains) and K9 gets to be very useful in his first proper story after joining the Tardis. Though even then, the framing narrative of the chess match in the console room doesn’t quite gel. I don’t think I’ll watch this one again, unless the DVD commentary is particularly good.
This time around, I felt myself falling between the two poles: yes, cracking satire by Holmes and good performances from the bad guys; but the rebels are really unpleasant and the violence very squicky.
It also struck me that the future of humanity on Pluto is rather white. There is one exception, an uncredited Work Unit who appears on the roof in episode 4:
Who was she? The surviving paperwork, supplied to me by Paul Scoones, has four extras with women’s names booked for the filming in Bristol on 19 June 1977, six months before the episode was shown.
The four names are Jennie Weston, Elizabeth Havelock, Angela Towner and Marion Venn. Surprisingly, I think I have tracked down three of them.
So I think my mystery actor, possibly the only actor of colour in the whole of Season 15 of Doctor Who, is Angela Towner (The Complete History thinks it’s “Angela Tower”, but Paul Scoones was able to find legible paperwork in which the name is clear). This could well have been her only professional acting role, asked to stand around with a crowd on top of a factory in Bristol on an overcast and not very warm Thursday, before going on to a life doing something completely different. It’s entirely possible that her surname subsequently changed, which would make it much more difficult to track down her later performances if any.
Oh yeah, I reread the novelisation by Terrance Dicks as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
However, K9’s brand of logic, based on his recollection of past events, and an extrapolation of future probabilities, told him that the Doctor would land in trouble within a very short time of leaving the TARDIS. He would need K9’s remarkable powers to rescue him from the dangers into which his rashness had led him. It was therefore logical that K9 should exercise these powers as soon as possible.
In 2008 I wrote:
Doctor Who and the Sunmakers is probably the best of these nine books [the Leela novelisations]; Dicks clearly appreciated Robert Holmes’ script and seems to have really got into the spirit of it. There is an interesting scene in the book but not in the TV series where Leela encounters some elderly workers waiting for euthanasia. Various other minor details are tweaked and basically improved in Dicks’ telling of the story.
Watching the series with the production subtitles switched on, I could see that Dicks was working from Holmes’ script as originally envisaged, and making the most of it.
Anyway. After my very grumpy post about the Black Archive on Kill the Moon, I’m very glad to say that Lewis Baston’s monograph on The Sun Makers was much more to my liking.
The first chapter, “‘An Unprofitable Operation, Hade’: The Sun Makers in context”, looks at the social and economic difficulties of the UK in general and of Robert Holmes in particular at the time the story was made.
The second chapter, “‘The Grandest Society of Merchants in the Universe'”, convincingly analyses the extent to which The Sun Makers draws not from contemporary Britain but from the history of the East India Company.
The third chapter, “‘Sacrifices to Tribal Gods'”, announces up front that it examines Doctor Who’s treatment of economics in general, but it also veers into the steaming subplot and death as entertainment, re-done (not as well) in Vengeance on Varos a few years later, and the influence of the Aztecs (much less in the finished programme than was planned by Holmes). Its second paragraph is:
The Sun Makers came relatively early in Doctor Who’s late 1970s engagement with economics. Before then, the principal economic concern was energy, hence baleful consequences in Fury from the Deep (1968), Inferno (1970) and The Claws of Axos (1971) and the background to Terror of the Zygons (1975). The Doctor consistently takes a dim view of humanity’s fossil fuel dependence.
The fourth chapter, “Empire of the Iron Sun”, looks at imperialism as protrayed in science fiction, especially Doctor Who, and also considers the influence of The Iron Sun by Adrian Berry (later Lord Camrose), and the anti-Semitism in the portrayal of the Collector.
The fifth chapter, “‘The People Should Rise Up and Slaughter Their Oppressors'”, looks at the frankly revolutionary and Marxist agenda of the story. It doesn’t reflect, as I did, on how remarkable it is that this story should be written by a former policeman who fought in Burma in the second world war and whose other work is usually entertaining but not nearly as subversive.
The sixth chapter, “‘Praise the Company'”, moves on from 1977, reviews what has happened to us politically and economically since then, and comes to the gloomy conclusion that to an extent we all live in the Collector’s world now.
A brief conclusion ends with a pithy summing-up:
The Sun Makers, therefore, is a revolutionary, experimental tract that shows the signs of its origins as a piece of writing by Robert Holmes which was turned into television by the BBC in the late 1970s. It deals with big ideas, and it is full of allusions and tangents. It also fulfilled its role as entertaining Saturday evening television for a family audience as the nights drew in before Christmas 1977. And, perhaps above all, it is very funny.
I’d have liked a bit more on the parts of the story I didn’t like as much – the gratuitous violence and the poor production values – but this is a case where the Black Archive has achieved redemption for me: I think I like The Sun Makers a bit more, now that I have read this analysis of it. You can get it here.
The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)
Hugo vote counting time rather cuts into one’s reading…
Current
De verdwijning, by Guido Eekhout
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler
A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, edited by Nina Allan
Those Pricey Thakur Girls, by Anuja Chauhan
Last books finished
Airside, by Christopher Priest
Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks, by Frazer Hines
Next books
Doctor Who: Paradise Towers, by Stephen Wyatt
Reminiscences of a Bachelor, by Sheridan Le Fanu
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Pershing picked a blood-fattened leech from the back of his hand. His sleeve had torn and thorns had pulled across his forearm until it looked as if it had been whipped; his legs ached from the effort not to loose his footing and all the water in his body was gushing from his open pores. The motion of his shirt had burst a boil between his shoulder blades.
This is the second of a near-future trilogy co-written by a future Foreign Secretary and one of the founders of Private Eye in the late 1960s, of which the third is Scotch on the Rocks. The scenario is simple: in the mid-1970s, China demands the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control twenty years early, and activates agents deep within the British establishment in order to stay on top of the UK’s nuclear bluff. There is a tremendously tense chase through the corridors of power and less salubrious parts of England, as vital communications in the days before mobile phones require in-person meetings. It’s not all that plausible but it’s well drawn.
I first read it in the 1990s, when Douglas Hurd was still in government and Hong Kong still under British rule, and was struck then by the hopelessness with which the British position is portrayed: the Hong Kong garrison might hold out for 48 hours against a Chinese attack if very lucky; popular sentiment in Hong Kong would certainly shift against the British immediately if withdrawal seemed a serious prospect; the nuclear submarine commander in the Pacific knows that he and his vessel will be destroyed in retaliation if they fire on China. The British establishment is generally weak and in disarray.
This time round, having been in China myself only five months ago, I was struck by the stereotyping of the Chinese leadership. Hurd (who turned 94 on 4 March) was posted to China early in his diplomatic career, soon after the Communist take-over at a time when the foreign ministry (as my friend Peter Martin has written) was probably at its least efficient. In real life, China was consumed with the Cultural Revolution in the period between this book being written and the time it is set. I would add though that the portrayal of Hong Kong is warm and surely based on personal knowledge.
An interesting speculation on a historical might-have-been. You can get it here.
Scrapes a Bechdel pass on page 90 when two (named) Chinese women discuss ways of getting into Hong Kong.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Doom 94, by Janis Jonevs.
The cult of St Patrick goes back to the fifth century, when he returned to Ireland (having spent time there as a child slave) as a missionary bringing Christianity to the island. The details are very obscure – we have a couple of documents actually written by him which however are frustratingly vague in places. However, his brand proved powerful, and by the seventh century he was accepted as the patron saint of Ireland.
Leaping forward a thousand years, after the disintegration of the old Gaelic political leadership in Ireland – culminating with the voluntary but permanent exile of two crucial noblemen in 1607 – the Irish College in Leuven became one of the centres of Irish culture and external political activity. Indeed, during the whole seventeenth century, the land we now call Belgium was the only country where books were published in the Irish language – it was illegal in Ireland.
From 1612 there are records of the Irish exiles in Leuven celebrating St Patrick’s Day, so the history of March 17 as a diaspora festival really starts here; when you are in the auditorium of the college, formerly the chapel, you really are in the room where it happened. And a couple of days ago (St Patrick’s Day being a Sunday this year), the Celticanto trio of singers performed this electrifying rendition of Danny Boy to a spellbound audience. It was pretty amazing.
As a footnote, Leuven did not in fact witness the first recorded overseas celebration of St Patrick’s Day. St Augustine, in Florida, is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the contiguous USA founded by Europeans, in 1565. It was a Spanish settlement, but in 1600 the parish priest was an Irishman, Richard Arthur, known as Ricardo Artur locally; and he invoked the protection of St Patrick (rather than St Augustine, after whom the town was named) for the settlers. Local historian Michael Francis has found records that Artur organised public celebrations of St Patrick on 17 March 1600 and 1601, including a public procession in 1601. It’s not quite St Patrick’s Day as we know it; there was not much of a diaspora in Florida, and the tradition ended when Artur left the town.
But no need to quibble; today is a day for celebration. Lá Fhéile Pádraig sona daoibh!