• Google+: It May Have 10 Million Users, But They're Not Visiting Very Often
  I must say I've signed up but am barely using it.
  (tags: internet)
• An Eye-Opening Adventure in Socialized Medicine | NeuroTribes
  "Riding the Underground back to Great Portland Street, I felt an unexpected sense of exhilaration. I had experienced not just a visit to a new clinic, but an unfamiliar paradigm of medicine — one in which health care is abundant, easily available, and affordable, rather than scarce, expensive, and a hassle for both the patient and the doctor."
  (tags: ushealth)
• Belgium bans 'burqa' | openDemocracy
  "Belgium’s law banning the face-veil and other forms of face covering is badly drafted, unnecessary, and counter-productive" – I am proud to have voted for one of the authors of this piece in last year's election.
  (tags: belgium)

Steve Lyons is always interesting if not always completely successful, and this Seventh Doctor novel is a great idea which is not perfectly executed. The Tardis, with Benny and Ace, lands in an English village where mysterious things are afoot, but what appears at first to be a murder mystery turns out to be a return to a situation from the Doctor’s past. This was Lyons’ first Who novel (indeed, I think his first published work), and his prose style is still a tad unpolished in places with too many characters jostling for attention. But the core idea is audacious enough to make this one well worth reading.

Announcement here.

I extracted these stats from the Eurostat site:

(the numbers are births registered in each month of 2009, taken as a percentage of all births in 2009, divided by the number of days in the month)

September is just ahead of July as the top month for average daily birthrate in the EU, though July is top in more member states (16 to 8). November is just below December for the EU as a whole, though there is a lot more variation. Fascinating that most countries show a dip in August as compared to the two neighbouring months. The outliers are not surprisingly those with low birth rates combined with unusual climates (for the EU); Cyprus in light blue goes up and down more than any other, Malta the light orange which dips below the others in August and above the others in November, and Latvia is high in March and June.

Just idle curiosity really.

• The parliamentary fists of the majority – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
  "The Boycott Law is a double-edged sword that threatens to harm Israel’s international standing, and to play into the hands of those criticizing the quality of the country’s democracy."  – says the Speaker of the Knesset.
  (tags: middleeast humanrights)

The Hugo Voter Package includes five novels and five short stories by this year’s nominees for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. I don’t think I had ever cast a vote for this award before, so I found this tremendously helpful. I am a little uneasy that there is not a really equal basis of comparison – two novels, vs a novel and a short story, vs a novel, vs another novel, vs four short stories – but it’s difficult to imagine another way of doing it. I’m therefore listing the works on which I base my judgement along with, indeed before, the writers who are getting my votes (as usual, in reverse order).

6) Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia. I do have little hesitation in putting Monster Hunter International last. It is relentlessly single-tone, derivative and predictable, and I can’t see how anyone could rank it above any of the other works included in the package. To an extent the John W. Campbell Award is about the future of the genre; books like this take us way back to the past, with the incidentals slightly jazzed up for the twenty-first century, and I think it would be embarrassing for the genre if Correia won on the basis of this.

5) No Award. I wavered about putting it higher, but there is enough originality in all the other four nominees to make me feel that, while I might be surprised, I would not be embarrassed if any of them won.

4) I Am Not A Serial Killer, by Dan Wells. Of the novels supplied, this is the furthest out of the mainstream of the genre, a YA novel about a boy obsessed with serial killers who discovers that the mild-mannered next door neighbour is in fact a man-eating demon. There is some unevenness in the execution, but I can see that there is a vibrant and suitably weird imagination behind it.

3) The Magicians and “Endgame” by Lev Grossman. A very ambitious project, picking up on the various wizard school stories and series (most obviously Rowling) and parallel world (most obviously Lewis) but with older and hornier students. Some readers complained that the protagonists were rather depressing characters; I don’t object to that myself, but I did think there were sufficient structural problems with The Magicians to keep it off either of my top two spots.

2) “Doctor Diablo Goes Through The Motions”, “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela”, “Mister Hadji’s Sunset Ride” and “The Faithful Soldier Prompted”, by Saladin Ahmed. If this were a prize for the best title, Ahmed would walk away with it. The four stories supplied are very interesting, lucid short tales which bring the perspective of a culturally Islamic background to the wider genre. (I was a bit annoyed by the gratuitously variable fonts of the fourth story, but I don’t hold it against the author.) Ahmed may well be a better and more promising writer than my top choice, and certainly I found his writing much better than Correia or Wells. In the end, though, I don’t quite have enough to go on; at novel length, he might not be quite as good as Grossman, or he might turn out to be better than Beukes. Somewhat hesitantly, I put him between the two.

1) Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. (Moxyland is also included in the Hugo Voter Package, but I doubt that I will read it in time.) Zoo City is the only one of these books I had already read, thanks to its BSFA shortlisting. I thought it an assured and accomplished piece of work then, and I think the same now; none of the other nominees convince me that they are more deserving of the award, so my top vote goes to Beukes.

Previous Hugo category write-ups (though the Campbell Award is Not A Hugo): Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Work, Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form.

Hadzic arrested! (Reuters, BBC, Guardian).

• Out of the blue, into the black — Crooked Timber
  Labour Party adviser with extreme views on immigration dismissed as "over the top" and "simply not practicable" by leader of hard right Migration Watch thinktank.
  (tags: ukpolitics humanrights migration)

It’s a very long time since last I read this, though I had seen the most recent cinema adaptation – which was more faithful to the book than I remembered, at least as regards the lengthy period of time spent with the Beavers. It really takes a long time to get going, with much exposition from the Beavers and Mr Tumnus before we get to the main plot. As a seven-year-old I remember being baffled and also upset by Aslan’s death; now I perceive the heaviness of the allegory, but I am also impressed that Lewis makes the young reader care about a character whose first appearance is more than two thirds of the way into the book. And the style is good and clear: I just started reading Tolkien’s The Lost Road, and gosh, it’s clunky in comparison. Sure, the gender roles are rather traditional, and the Christianity rather blatant to the adult reader; but there is also a great sense of magic and of a deeper layer of lore and history to the Narnia universe, and you can see why it has lasted.

This book, published in June 1964, actually predates the first Doctor Who annuals and books, so I guess may be the very first Who spinoff literature evar. It is really not bad at all; alternating formats between comic strip and illustrated prose, and even a photonovel featuring the Doctor’s grand-daughter Susan, it tells the story of the Daleks’ attempt to invade and occupy Earth’s Solar System (a diagram showing Skaro swooshing past the orbits of the Sun’s other planets), opposed by the heroic efforts of Jeff, Andy and Mary Stone, good swash-buckling square-jawed heroes all three. Mary at one point is captured by the Daleks and persuades them to start taking better care of their prisoners, a story-line later used by Big finish for their character Susan Mendes in the Dalek Empire audios. On the one hand it’s very much related to the adventure comics of the day; on the other I liked the coherent narrative thread, which takes the format in a slightly different direction, and appreciated the expansion of Daleks-as-Nazis to Daleks-as-totalitarians, rewriting history at their convenience. This one is worth hunting down.

I can recommend this Sixth Doctor novel to my Whovian classicist friends: it is set in a world where Antony and Cleopatra discovered alien technology and won the Battle of Actium, and a generation later, their twins and Cleopatra’s son by Julius Cæsar together are ruling the known world as an uneasy triumvirate. Of course, all is not as it seems, but Bulis has produced quite a good story with some quite subtle underlying themes of change and transformation, and in particular gives Peri a rather better story than she usually gets. The characterisation of the Sixth Doctor is a bit off-kilter, but actually in rather a good way. Good fun.

This is a lovely heartwarming novel, set in 1946 and told in epistolary form, about a young woman who uncovers the story of a small group of people in Guernsey who held together through the German occupation by setting up a book club. It had me captivated in the first few pages, which economically portray a traumatised small society coming to terms with the present and the future, and then develops into a more conventional but entirely pleasing love story. Strongly recommended.

• To a Medical Center in Fresno | Easily Distracted
  "It became clear to me that as a matter of policy, the hospital was coping with a large number of local patients using its ER for ordinary medical care by passive-aggressive neglect. Unless you walked in with an immediately and obviously life-threatening condition, time would be your triage, not a medical professional. If you could endure waiting eight to nine hours, that was proof that your condition was sufficiently serious that you might need urgent care."
  (tags: ushealth)
• Nick Courtney's memorial service
  A sad occasion obviously but a lovely account. Look out for the photo of two Doctors and the vicar.
  (tags: doctorwho)
• Hugo Blogging – Connie Willis May Be The Worst Writer In Existence « Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
  Andrew Hickey not hugely impressed by Blackout / All Clear.
  (tags: sf)

I set off a bit earlier than usual this morning to take B out for lunch; she does love the occasional chicken curry sandwich, eaten at a picnic bench in the park. Meandering back through the streets of the town where she lives I was astonished to come across a ruined church which I had never seen before, and we stopped to explore it. She was in an unusually good mood, which was very nice to see:

It’s not clear in the last one, but she is actually jumping with joy. I did wonder if B was fascinated, as people like her often are, by the peculiar and slightly pleasing geometry of the ruined buildings.

The church turns out to have a rather sad history. It was at the centre of the old béguinage / begijnhof of the town, but most of the historic buildings were flattened in an Allied bombing raid in 1944 (I checked the official records of the RAF’s 537 Squadron, and all that is noted is that the raid, whose target was an airfield some distance away, was considered successful) and the church itself, parts of which dated from 1250 was then burnt out in a fire in the mid-1970s. The ruins were restored as a public park in 1997.

The rest of us went out for a different excursion in the afternoon. Our province is holding a ‘hidden heritage’ day today and F, given the catalogue to browse from, chose a windmill near Aarschot as a thing he would like to see. (Most of the other options were churches.) I’m very pleased with this first picture taken from the carpark:

but it doesn’t quite capture the impressive speed with which the sails were turning. The effects on my family’s hair are more visible here:

Inside we were able to see the machinery, the huge wheels spinning with fearsome momentum:

and the corn disappearing down to be ground by the millstones:

The mill was actually built in 1667 in Mechelen, and then moved to its current base near Aarschot in 1833. So it has been in its second location slightly longer than in its first location, 178 years rather than 166.

Good choice, F!

The answer to yesterday’s question, which Doctor Who companion features in this story…

…may surprise you:

As several people speculated, it is a story called “A Message of Mystery” from one of the spinoff Dalek books, the original Dalek Book of 1964, and must be the very first example of a published adventure in the Whoniverse featuring a canonical companion but with no Doctor in sight.

In this chapter, the Byzantines, Saracens and Franks battle over Italy, and the Normans arrive and take over the south of the peninsula and Sicily, as well as further adventures in the vicinity. Also my reflections on Italy as a concept, learning and toleration, and a strange story about attempted castration which somehow appropriately ends up with Tristram Shandy.

• Maylong Android Tablet: more versatile than you think | BBYOPEN
  Brilliant – now you know what to do with your Android! (Options include faking a phone call on it).
  (tags: phone)
• Dezeen » Blog Archive » House on the outskirts of Brussels by Samyn and Partners
  House whose walls look as if they are entirely made of growing plants – awesome!
  (tags: belgium architecture)

Which Doctor Who companion features in this story?

(I keep on finding more spinoff literature…)

Just to start with a few lines on the brilliant TV adaptation of the first book of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. I thoroughly enjoyed it; the acting and staging were superb, and while I wouldn’t go as far as Abigail Nussbaum in extolling its superiority to the original book, I certainly agree that it builds very effectively on what I felt was anyway an effective novel.

It is going to be very difficult to select a single episode to nominate for next year’s Hugos for Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form, though I suppose either or both of the last two might be appropriate; to be honest I’d rather nominate the entire series in the Long Form category even though it will then be doomed to defeat by this year’s cinematic releases.

Changing the subject back to the books, back in 2006/2007 I started rereading the whole series, in the hope that A Dance With Dragons would come out neatly in time to fit my pacing. But after I had reread A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and the two parts of A Storm of Swords, the new book seemed no closer to coming out and I left A Feast for Crows on the shelf – I had read it for the first time shortly after it came out in 2005, which was a lot more recent then. Now, of course, I have been caught out by A Dance With Dragons finally appearing, so felt a sudden need to catch up.

I don’t have a lot to add to what I wrote about it, getting on for six years ago. I had forgotten the details of the Dornish links with the Targaryens, the encounter between Samwell and Arya in the streets of Braavos, and the promise of queenship made by Petyr Littlefinger to Sansa Stark, the first and third of which presumably will get more play in the coming book (the three queens presumabl being Cersei, Daenerys and Sansa; or Myrcella if Cersei is done for by the religious zealots she has unleashed). I still think that the abandoning of the Greyjoy plotline is a bit of a weakness in the structure. But the Dornish bits made more sense to me now, partly because it’s a contrast with Cersei’s mishandling of her own situation, but mainly because I don’t resent the introduction of yet more viewpoint characters as I did on first reading. Brienne’s story is in a similar way a contrast to Jaime’s, as well as a means of grounding the narrative in the sufferings of the smallfolk.

Anyway, I found it an easy and very pleasurable (if long) read, and am very much looking forward to starting the next volume.

• The Story of Marli-hrair and the Black Rabbit of Inle
  Would you believe it? A Watership Down fanfic that sends a chill down the spine!
  (tags: sf fanfic)
• Sortition won't lie down: a blueprint for a truly representative House of Lords | openDemocracy
  A far better idea for reforming the Upper House than the government's current proposals.
  (tags: ukpolitics)
• Getting to Crazy – NYTimes.com (Paul Krugman)
  "A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask. Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye."
  (tags: usa economics politics)

Torchwood is on British TV again this evening, our transatlantic friends having already seen the new episode; but we’ve also had three new Torchwood audios over the last few days, broadcast on BBC Radio Four and downloadable from the Beeb’s site, featuring John Barrowman as Jack, Eve Myles as Gwen and Gareth David Lloyd as Ianto (which gives you an idea of the setting in continuity).

The first thing to say about them is that, unlike in the three Torchwood audio plays broadcast two years ago, John Barrowman appears to have woken up and discovered how to act without the visuals. All three of the regulars are on form here, and most of the guest cast are too.

The weakest of the three plays is the first, The Devil and Miss Carew, by Rupert Laight, despite the presence of Martin Jarvis on the cast list. The death of Rhys’s uncle is linked with a mysteriously rejuvenated businesswoman, and lots of irritating plot points that didn’t quite add up (analysed in spoilery detail by here and here and here).

The title of the middle play, Submission by Ryan Scott (a new name to me, I think), is a bit of a cheat – in fact the story is about a mission on a submarine, thus “sub” “mission”, as Jack, Gwen, Ianto and Ianto’s ex-girlfriend who didn’t become a Cyberwoman descend into the Marianas Trench to find the answer to the latest mysterious happenings. It’s a rattling decent yarn with an element of ghost story as well, though the ease with which our heroes blagged their way onto the submarine reminded me of the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe taking control of the world’s only functioning space rocket in The Seeds of Death, and I have a strong suspicion that not all of the American accents would pass muster. But I was impressed by Erin Bennett as Ianto’s former flame.

As with the 2009 audios, the best is the last, The House of the Dead by the usually excellent James Goss, who is on form here. The Torchwood team intervene in a seance at the most haunted pub in Wales; but very little is as it seems, and the regular cast are stretched way beyond their usual areas of performance – including Eve Myles, though her role is secondary to Barrowman and Lloyd in this one. Strongly recommended, especially to Ianto fans.

And all three plays deal in slightly different ways with cheating death, which I suspect ties in to the theme of the new television Torchwood as well. Looking forward to it.

• How to consistently get London-Brussels or Brussels-London Eurostar tickets for €49 single // Jon Worth
  Avoiding the ripoff prices on Eurostar.com!
  (tags: travel)
• Opinion: Schools should suit working parents
  "Nursery is run for working parents: open 8-6, three meals a day provided, flexible arrival and departure time, and one itemised monthly bill. School is very different: closed 14 weeks of the year, and finishing around 3pm the other 38."
  (tags: life)
• Republican bill to ban energy-saving lightbulbs fades
  Republicans fail in bid to defend freedom from energy-saving lightbulbs.
  (tags: usa politics)

This is one of the best New Who books I have read, and certainly the most mature of the standard range of Eleventh Doctor novels (which I felt generally have been written for a younger readership). The plot is an alien conflict being played out in rural England in 1936, but the point is the rather good exploration of the regular characters – particularly Rory, from a point in time shortly before his wedding to Amy – and a lot of squeeful continuity references. And I detected a load of other literary allusions in the story as well: I don’t think I’m completely imagining either Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Agatha Christie (I almost wrote that Russell did The Unicorn and the Wasp, but of course that was Gareth Roberts). Anyway, this one is highly recommended to those fans of previous ranges of Who novels who have felt something a bit lacking in the New Series Adventures.

• My encounter with the News of the World « Shropshire Star
  (tags: news)
• tansyrr.com» Blog Archive » Pratchett’s Women: The Boobs, the Bad and the Broomsticks
  "Pratchett was very much aware of some of the dreadful sexism in his source material, and the female characters he wrote were often in direct response to what he saw in the fantasy genre. His intentions to point out the silliness of the portrayal of women in fantasy, sadly, backfired somewhat."
  (tags: sf sexandsexualityandgender)

A rather bold novel which merges the Harry Potter books with The Secret History by Donna Tartt with a certain amount of Narnia too. I liked the basic ideas a lot, especially the subversive concept of making the central characters at wizard school a bunch of maladjusted students in their late teens and early twenties; and some of the individual scenes and plot twists are very well executed. But it is rather annoyingly structured, with the plot taking a long time to get going and then seeming not very clear about when the story is over.

Another of the books included in the Hugo Voter Package to help us make up our minds how to vote in the John W. Campbell Award For New Writers. I liked The Magicians much more than Monster Hunter International, and sufficiently more than I Am Not a Serial Killer to be fairly sure that I will rank Grossman ahead of Larry Correia and Dan Wells, but behind Lauren Beukes. (Which still leaves me with the short stories of Saladin Ahmed to go through.)

• Language Log » Genre
  Use of "genre" as a particle.
  (tags: french languages linguistics)
• Amazon has eaten our beloved Book Depository
  " For those of us already concerned about Amazon's internal ethics, this anti-competitive takeover is worrying" – too right!
  (tags: bookbuying)
• Tasting 800 Belgian Beers
  I am privileged to have participated in this project an early stage.
  (tags: belgium)

It is not all that long since I read The Canterbury Tales, which comes from the same century and draws from the same roots (the Reeve’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale are indeed both in the Decameron in slightly different form). But I was struck by how much more enjoyable the Decameron is. For a start, it is actually complete – ten days of ten people telling a tale each, to give a hundred short stories and a framing narrative. It is also striking that the dullest of Boccaccio’s stories (the ones from Day Six with the untranslatable punchlines) are still better than the worst of Chaucer (the Monk’s Tale, the Parson’s Tale, and for my money the interminable Knight’s Tale). Boccaccio’s geography is also generally better than Chaucer’s, including even in Europe north of the Alps – one character ends up in Strangford, County Down; I’m not sure that Chaucer even mentions Ireland.

These are almost all great tales of incident, and I think anyone with an interest in the mechanics of storytelling would find useful material here. While almost all stories are set in fourteenth century Europe, with humour depending on an understanding of society’s expectations of marriage and the Church, a lot of it I think is basic commentary on the human situation and could be easily transferred to other situations; or simply updated to the idiom of a new century, as Shakespeare did in All’s Well That Ends Well. I am sure there are better translations out there than the 1982 Musa/Bondanella version for Penguin which I read, but even that gets a very strong recommendation from me.

Here’s a series of songs with seven beats to the bar:

The Beatles, “All You Need Is Love” (the verses only, the chorus seems to be in 4/4):

Rather more frantically, “Mother”, an early song by The Police:

On a different plane, the chorus “Old Joe Has Gone Fishing” from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes:

Probably even more famous than “All You Need Is Love” (and qualifies better for this list since it is mostly in 7/4) – “Money” by Pink Floyd:

If you watch none of the others, do watch Dave Brubeck’s joyous “Unsquare Dance”: