A short classic French novel, whose central character isn’t so much Goriot as Eugène de Rastignac, who shares a Paris boarding-house with Goriot and falls in love with one of his daughters. The Goriot daughters have some nasty emotional manipulation going on with their father and their ennobled husbands, and Eugène is way out of his depth. One of his other fellow tenants is a master criminal in disguise, who makes Eugène the original offer that he cannot refuse, a line directly borrowed by The Godfather. (NB however that Eugène actually does refuse the offer.) I found the translation a bit clunky but the plot rather engaging. Apparently Balzac wrote dozens of novels in his Comédie Humaine series, and died with over a hundred more planned but unwritten.

We took advantage of the decent weather yesterday to take a trip up to County Tyrone, to see three ancient mystical sites.

Ardboe

The first of these is the ruined abbey and High Cross at Ardboe, on the shores of Lough Neagh:

It was actually a strategic mistake to come here at noon; the cross is in an awkward place to photograph and it’s rather difficult to capture properly.

I think if one came in the evening the light from the west would be kinder both to the cross and to Lough Neagh, which is never going to win a prize for most beautiful lake in these islands:

But the mingling of new and old monuments at the site is rather striking:

And the medieval abbey church has become a public space of commemoration:

I’ll do another post on the carvings on the cross, but for now we move on to

Beaghmore

I had known about the Beaghmore circles for decades but had never been to find them. They are very peculiar indeed. There are seven stone circles altogether, most of them in pairs.

But one on its own is filled with smaller stones, known as the ‘Dragon’s Teeth’:

Mysterious lines of stones radiate from between the circles:

And small cairns, apparently containing cremated human remains, mark the last resting places of some of the people who lived here three millennia ago.

Reception up there is not fantastic but I was able to tweet a picture of it, which two people recognised.

Tullahogue

Our last stop was Tullahogue, the ancient fort where the Kings of Ulster were inaugurated. Note the greengrocer’s apostrophe in the official sign welcoming visitors:

There’s not in fact a lot to see here; it’s a well-kept green space, unused since Mountjoy’s troops destroyed the ceremonial chair and burnt the vicinity in 1602:

I was able to add Tullahogue as a check-in on Foursquare; not terribly surprised that I was the first to do so!

And so we returned home in time for me to cook the dinner.

Fifth Doctor, Turlough and Sontarans, on a human colony with an Indian cultural background, and the Rutans make an appearance as well. Lots of good continuity for both Turlough and the Sontarans, and lots of good world-building, combined with a decent plot; one to look out for.

In this chapter, the Crusades continue for almost two hundred years, as the Christian outposts in the Eastern Mediterranean dwindle and eventually disappear – some good descriptions of the eventual falls of Jerusalem, Louis IX and Acre. (The end of the Fourth Crusade is left for the next chapter.) See also comments on Bernard of Clairvaux’s penis, Pope Innocent III, the Kurds, colonialism, and the emperor Frederick II.

• james_nicoll: Have a pretty video
  Asteroid discoveries from 1980 to 2011
  (tags: astronomy)

• I just finished watching Battlefield, in which the Seventh Doctor promises to cook dinner in the final line.
• In The Lodger, the Eleventh Doctor actually is seen cooking (as is the Tenth Doctor in the original comic strip story that the TV episode is based on).
• Over on Twitter, Ian Potter points out that it is strongly implied that the Sixth Doctor cooked the nut roast that Peri reports throwing out in Resurrection of the Daleks.

Any other references to the Doctor actually cooking, on TV or in spinoff literature and audios?

This was the best-selling novel of 1911, a romantic tale set in about 1811 where you know what is going to happen from the very first page, when Peter Vibart is promised a vast legacy if he will marry Sophia Sefton, but declares he would rather not. He flees metropolitan life to the village of Sissinghurst in Kent, where he encounters many good-hearted comic yokels and falls in love with a mysterious woman who comes to live with him in his cottage. She has firm, well-rounded arms. (That’s arms, I say, arms.) It takes Peter (unlike the reader) most of the book to work out her real identity, and to deal with his rival for the marital legacy, his rather two-dimensionally villainous cousin, though I guess he is distracted by the occasional staggering coincidence and his anachronistic inclination towards Christian Science doctrine. I had never heard of Farnol before but apparently he was one of the most successful popular novelists of the first half of the twentieth century, and I suppose I can see the attraction of his undemanding yet breathless style. (Sissinghurst, by the way, was called Milkstreet in 1811 and changed its name only later in the century; more anachronism.)

• The Bible vs the Facts
  Dissecting the difference between faith (believing things that cannot be disproved) and superstition (believing things that can).
  (tags: religion)

This was on my list to read this summer anyway, but it was nice to have got to it after the references in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Carlo Gebler’s play about the Lambs. It’s really very good – a retelling of Shakespeare’s dramas, which are not really easy reading for today’s reader (or even the reader of 1807) in digestible prose, aimed at sophisticated teenagers. It’s surprising what is censored and what is kept in, given how we tend to imagine nineteenth-century senisibilities – the blinding in King Lear is out, and the detail of Antiochus’ incest (and Marina’s life in the brothel) in Pericles, but so for some reason is the entire Malvolio subplot in Twelfth Night. However, the immorality laws of Vienna in Measure for Measure are explained, and so is the detail of Macduff’s birth in Macbeth (of course an important plot detail but one that could have been worked round with imagination). Knowing what I now do about the authors, I was also struck by the sympathetic treatment of mental illness in the summary of Hamlet, which sets a good example rarely met in later literature. Strongly recommended.

Bold if you’ve read, italicize ones you fully intend to read, underline if it’s a book/series you’ve read part but not all of. Strikethrough if you never plan to read the book or hated it.

1. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song of Ice and Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
22. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
23. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
24. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
25. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
26. The Stand, by Stephen King
27. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
28. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
29. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
31. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
32. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne
38. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
47. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan the Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne
73. The Legend of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book of the Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldon
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
93. A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis

I must say that of those I haven’t read (or series I haven’t finished) the only ones that really appeal are The Princess Bride and Something Wicked This Way Comes. But feel free to convince me otherwise in comments.

• Samuel J. Seymour, Last Surviving Witness Of Lincoln Assassination, Appears On Television In 1956 (VIDEO)
  Extraordinary.
  (tags: usa)
• IBM Leads the Way in the Post-PC Era | A Smarter Planet Blog
  I’m proud that I was one of a dozen IBM engineers who designed the first machine and was fortunate to have lead subsequent IBM PC designs through the 1980s.  It may be odd for me to say this, but I’m also proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo. While many in the tech industry questioned IBM’s decision to exit the business at the time, it’s now clear that our company was in the vanguard of the post-PC era.
• Interview: John Baird | Foreign Policy
  Interview with Canada's foreign minster. "‎A friend of mine's daughter is a consultant at one of the major consulting houses and she needed to bring her university degree to show, which she did and it had a nice Princeton logo on it. The border guard then explained to her that the United States was an English-speaking country and she should get it translated because it was in Latin."
  (tags: usa)
• A Box You Want to Uncheck on LinkedIn « Connection Agent
  Linkedin tries to be like Facebook. Bad idea.
  (tags: internet)

I was alerted to this book (PDF download) by the excellent Jonathan Fryer, who like me (but with more regret) concludes after reading it that the most likely outcome of the current push to reform the House of Lords is that nothing will happen. The book is a collection of thirteen essays on the subject by various figures, roughly evenly balanced between practitioners and academics (with some fitting both categories), published jointly by the (Lib Dem leaning) thinktank CentreForum and the Constitution Society. I had not previously heard of either of these organisations, but the latter’s Alexandra Fitzpatrick, who edited the book, provides an eight-page introduction which summarises the essays so well that you can almost skip the rest of the book.

A couple of points are clear from the majority of the essays. In general, the need for elections to an upper house is asserted as self-evident by reformers but dissected rather forensically by other contributors. But specifically, apart from those actually on the government’s payroll, support for the current proposals seems non-existent, with the Labour Party, which like the two coalition parties went into the 2010 election promising reform, unlikely to back this particular set of ideas, which do not go far enough for reformers, and go too far for those comfortable with the status quo.

Many of the contributors make the functional point that a more democratic upper chamber will be much more comfortable in challenging the Commons and the government of the day, and that the current coalition proposals are dishonestly silent about this. People vary as to whether or not this rebalancing of powers would be a good thing, but agree that it should not be so flippantly introduced. (My old friend David Howarth is particularly strong on this.)

I hadn’t taken in a couple of the weirder points of the current proposals – that elected members won’t be eligible for re-election ever, and won’t be allowed to stand for the House of Commons for four years after leaving the upper house. I feel this critically weakens the democratic credibility of the reform – you can vote them in, but you can’t vote them out. You might as well go for sortition, which is cheaper (but not mentioned in this book). And there is no discussion (not even by Richard Harries) of why twelve Church of England bishops should get to stay on ex officio, actually increasing the episcopal percentage of the house.

Finally, two of the contributors (Bob McLennan and Dawn Oliver) propose that alongside a democratic reform of the Lords, a body of independent experts should be established to take over the job of revising draft legislation. This seems to me a classic case of reinventing the wheel; the present system has essentially produced such a body anyway. (My own views have been vented a couple of times, here and here.)

Anyway, it’s a good digestible set of perspectives on the debate, recommended also to Irish readers given the push for reform (or, in my preference, abolition) of the Seanad.

• wwhyte: Top posting FAQ
  "A3: Please.""Q3: Should I avoid top posting on this mailing list?"
  (tags: internet)
• wwhyte: Bottom posting FAQ
  " Is there a way of contributing to email conversations that allows you to make your contribution easy to find for people who've been following the discussion, while preserving the entire thread for the benefit of people who are new to it?"
  (tags: internet)

Six more Seventh Doctor stories today:

And straight in from Paradise Towers, we have another icon of British comedy, Ken Dodd, appearing in Delta and the Bannermen (and also getting killed off, but earlier rather than later). There are a lot of elements here that come close to working individually – the holiday camp, the bemused Americans, the rapidly growing alien child, the love triangle; but the whole is somehow a bit less than the sum of its parts, with the Bannermen themselves rather a weak element, and the feeling that not everyone involved totally understood what was going on. I wonder if we would regard the series in a better light if the sun had shone a bit more reliably during filming?

If one takes Dragonfire as a comedy of character and manners, rather than an attempt at a hard sf plot, it doesn’t do too badly. The setting of a resort with a nasty undercurrent is slightly too similar to Delta and the Bannermen but the execution is so different that not many viewers will notice. Glitz’s return is another re-anchoring of the show in recent years – it’s not just the Rani who is shared with the rest of the Old Who universe, but random dubious smugglers as well. Sophie Aldred is better as Ace than I remembered, and the same goes for the baddies. And the whole thing is mercifully short.

And it’s farewell to Mel, who seems to have arrived only yesterday. (Having been around for a season and almost a half, she rates better than a lot of companions; but when you consider that that is only six stories, it’s less than anyone since Liz Shaw apart from Kamelion.) With the exception of Susan, she is the only companion who we meet after she is already travelling with the Doctor, so we get the background information about her by info-dump rather than by being shown. I think her dynamic with Colin Baker is very good, and much more healthy than the Peri/Six dynamic; it isn’t quite sustained to Sylvester McCoy, who needs to be a mentor rather than a partner. For such a clever girl she screams a lot, and the writers gave her few memorable lines; but she is far from being disastrous, and indeed helps the Colin Baker era to end on less of a sour note, as well as getting a rather empowering ending herself.

(Interesting to note that Seven/Mel is literally the only canonical Doctor/companion team never to have featured in any spinoff novel.)

There now follows the biggest recantation of my former views that I have expressed in this entire run of rewatches. I actually enjoyed Remembrance of the Daleks, which I have previously ranked lowest of all the Seventh Doctor stories. But I think a couple of things were different for me this time. One of my previous objections was to the story’s failure to really feel much like 1963; but I think after Delta and the Bannermen, I’m more in the mood for catching what the BBC thought was going on in the recent past. On previous watches I found the incidental music jarring and intrusive; again, watching it five stories into the McCoy era, that bothers me less. But I think most of all it is the discipline of watching an episode at a time, rather than all in one go and wondering when the other Dalek faction or Davros are going to show up; and it somehow seemed to me that I grasped the plot much better on this viewing, and appreciated its subtleties and the skill of execution really for the first time. Ben Aaronovitch, if you are reading this, I take it all back. (About this story anyway. Check in again later in the month when I rewatch Battlefield.)

Continuing along this theme of rehabilitation, I found The Happiness Patrol an excellent piece of sinister dystopia, following on from Paradise Towers. The interaction between Helen A and her retainers and servitors is tremendously engaging, with Fifi one of the great non-speaking parts (like the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona, only much more vicious); and one wonders why it came as a surprise to anyone to learn that it was a deliberate though not hugely accurate tilt at Thatcherism. Doctor Who does not do space opera terribly well, but this is not space opera, it is allegory played with bitter ironic comedy, and fits McCoy’s portrayal beautifully.

I can’t quite be as positive about Silver Nemesis, though again I liked it more than I had expected to. It is the first time we have had a contemporary English setting since, errr, the last Cybermen story three years ago, but it doesn’t really make enough of the normality such a set-up offers, setting us up with real (Courtney Pine) and fake (the Queen) celebrities and then bringing in Lady Peinforte and De Flores through literal and metaphorical timewarps, with added Cybermen. A lot of the bits work well, including the increasing sense of the Doctor as someone with a number of devious plans which we don’t know about (and Fiona Walker’s delightfully psychotic Lady Peinforte) but it doesn’t quite add up together.

And finally for this run, once again I enjoyed The Greatest Show In The Galaxy more than I was expecting to. The storyline is awfully simple – the Psychic Circus as a deathtrap set by ancient powerful beings, the Doctor and Ace trying to escape from it and destroy it – and there is therefore an awful lot of circular plotting before the dénouement, but somehow the extra bits tacked on to the plot all add to it. A particular cheer for T.P. McKenna’s fraudulent Captain Cook as a parody of the show’s central character, and the earnest fan played by Adrian Mole Gian Sammarco who finds that the object of his fascination is a fatal obsession; but Jessica Martin and Chris Drury are excellent too, and the whole thing just looks so much better than we were getting two years ago (or even one year ago). Let’s hope they can keep up the standards for a few more years.

So there we have it – the second-last of my write-ups, and a much more positive one than I had expected it would be. I should wrap up the enire project later this month – I am extending my definition of Old Who to include Dimensions in Time and The Movie which will mean I will once again have six stories in my final write-up.

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

• 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.)