(Written for Stratagem, 04 May 2011)

One of the joys of the PR-STV system for us analysts is the wealth of detail revealed about voter preferences when one looks at transfers. This became particularly glorious in the election for the Dáil in February, when Fianna Fáil’s difficulty in attracting transfers meant that they won only 19 of the 165 contested seats, rather than the 29 one might have expected from their vote share.

Transfers tend to be more predictable in Northern Ireland’s elections. Nationalists will transfer to nationalists first, then to centre parties or moderate unionists if there is no remaining nationalist candidate. Unionists will transfer amongst themselves, then to centre parties if they are available, then to the SDLP ahead of Sinn Féin.

The most spectacular example of transfers making a difference in 2007 was the Upper Bann count, where George Savage, in eighth place with only 2,167 first preference votes, was pulled ahead of the trailing DUP candidate on transfers from his own party colleagues, and then was pulled ahead of the second SF candidate once the DUP transfers trickled to him, taking the last seat by a comfortable four-figure margin.

There were four other constituencies in 2007 where one of the top six candidates on first preferences failed to get elected, in all four cases losing out to the SDLP whose candidate had placed seventh: in West Belfast and South Antrim, the losers were the DUP, and in Fermanagh & South Tyrone and Foyle, Sinn Féin candidates similarly lost. The SDLP deserve good marks in general for their vote management, which however went awry in West Tyrone where three SDLP candidates with a quota of votes between them failed to transfer between each other and allowed Independent candidate Kieran Deeny to retain his seat. Sinn Féin, of course, did even more impressively, getting five candidates elected in West Belfast, with less than five hundred votes separating Gerry Adams’ four running-mates.

But it is terribly difficult to make concrete generalisations about how voters use transfers. The Assembly itself reported that in the 2007 election, “79% of transfers from unionist voters went to other unionist party candidates; 12% went to nationalist party candidates. 64% of transfers from nationalist voters went to other nationalist party candidates; 13% went to unionist party candidates.” But this is probably no more than a mathematical statement, only loosely related to voters’ actual behaviour.

To explain this, it may be worth exploring the subtleties of the three different circumstances in which votes actually get transferred. The first, and most obvious, is when a candidate is deemed elected on the first count – when their number of first preferences exceeds the electoral quota (which in a six-seat Assembly election is a seventh of the total valid vote, plus one). In this case all of their votes are checked to see if they have a later preference, and only the ones that do are taken into account – so in other words, if you get 1,000 votes, and the quota is 800, you have a surplus of 200 votes; but if half of your 1,000 votes are from ‘plumpers’ who only voted for you and nobody else, that means that the other half are transferred at a value of 0.40, the surplus (200) divided by the number of transferable votes (500). The ‘non-transferable’ votes which appear in the results sheets at this point are a fictional accounting factor, and are very indirectly related to the number of votes which actually were non-transferable.

A real-life example from the last election: in North Antrim, Sinn Féin’s Daithí McKay received 7,065 first preferences, 731 more than the 6,334 quota. He then transferred 300.74 and 280.39 votes to the two SDLP candidates, 99.44 and 0.88 to the two Independent candidates, 10.34 to Alliance, 2.64 and 0.33 to the DUP candidates, 2.09 and 0.44 to the UUP candidates, and 0.11 to the UKUP, with a reported non-transferable tally of 33.60. The full details are not reported, but there is enough information here to work it out: if the UKUP received only one transferred ballot paper, then all McKay’s transferred first preferences went at a value of 0.11, so we have reported destinations for 6,340 of them, and the other 725 must have had no further preferences (or else voted only for McKay and for either or both of the two Ian Paisleys, who had been elected by the time McKay’s votes were transferred).

The logic of this is simple enough – voters who plump for a candidate get their full value for their vote with that candidate; voters who transfer get a sufficient fraction of their vote remaining with their first choice to keep them just over the quota, and the rest is transferred. The purist in me would like to see Northern Ireland elections use another decimal place in their calculations – if McKay’s votes had been transferred at a ratio of 0.115 rather than 0.11, the figure added to the ‘non-transferable’ tally would have been 1.900 rather than 33.60, which strikes me as neater. On the other hand I’m not aware of any case where this would have made a difference to an election result in the last 40 years.

There are two other circumstances where votes are transferred. If a candidate reaches the quota at a later stage in the process, then again their surplus votes are transferred – but only from the last batch of votes that came in. Again looking at North Antrim in 2007, on the second count Ian Paisley Jr was elected when he received a transfer of 1158.04 votes from his father, taking him from 6,106 first preferences to 7264.04 total votes, well over the 6,334 quota. The votes that then got transferred from Ian Paisley Jr’s surplus were not his own first preferences, but those he had received from his father (and they might also, though we may consider it improbable, have had second or third preferences for Daithí McKay).

This also means that we have to sometimes be cautious in describing where transfers come from. In the last count in Foyle in 2007, for instance, a Sinn Féin candidate’s surplus of 109.04 transferred fairly evenly between three SDLP candidates (one got 42.93, another 36.45 and the third 28.35) with 1.31 added to the non-transferable tally. But this bare account of the numbers leaves out interesting detail: we were actually looking at 361 ballot papers, of which only 133 (37%) transferred to the SDLP at a value of 0.81, the rest going nowhere; and the source of these ballot papers was not in fact Sinn Féin, but a transfer to Sinn Féin from Eamonn McCann, then of the Socialist Environmental Alliance. (Similarly the distribution of the surplus of Alliance’s Kieran McCarthy in Strangford, which heavily favoured the SDLP over the DUP, actually consisted of first preference votes for the Green Party.)

The final circumstance of votes being transferred is when candidates are eliminated. This happens when a candidate, or a group of candidates, has fewer votes than anyone else and no possible arrangement of spare votes can save them. In general this works as you would expect, the votes being examined to see if there are preferences for any other candidates remaining in the race, and if so, allocated to them. There is, however, one little-known extra subtlety. If an eliminated candidate has acquired votes with a fractional value, directly or indirectly from an elected candidate’s surplus, those votes are transferred last, and whole votes are transferred first; and if any other candidate is taken over the quota by the transferred whole votes, they are not considered for the distribution of the fractions. So it is not at all unusual to see a column of transferred votes in which only one or two are whole numbers, and those go to candidates who get elected on that count.

All of this frustrates those of us who are trying to calculate definitive transfer ratios and work out where voters believe that the parties are in relation to one another. Votes are not simple; voters operate the system with subtlelty. But we psephologists should remember that the system was not designed for our mathematical convenience, but to give voters fair representation, while not over-complicating the task of the counting staff; and it has performed very well for the last four decades.

i) births and deaths

4 May 1912: birth of Peter Bathurst, who played Hensell in The Power of the Daleks (1966-67) and Chinn in The Claws of Axos (1971).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

4 May 1968: broadcast of second episode of The Wheel in SpacePlanet of the Spiders. The Doctor investigates a clairvoyant; Mike Yates and Sarah Jane investigate a meditation cult under the control of spiders.

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(Written for Stratagem, 03 May 2011)

In the first election to the Northern Ireland House of Commons, in 1921, two women, Dehra Chichester and Julia McMordie, were elected to its 52 seats, both Ulster Unionists. In the course of Stormont’s history, eight more were elected to the lower chamber (six unionists, an independent and a Liberal) and two to the 26-member Senate. There was only one woman member of the Stormont House of Commons when it was prorogued in 1972 (Anne Dickson, later leader of the UPNI).

The record of the institutions elected immediately after the fall of Stormont is not much better. The 1973-74 Assembly had four women members out of 78, Anne Dickson as an independent unionist, Eileen Paisley for the DUP, and Shena Conn and Jean Coulter as unionists; the same four were elected to the 1975 Constitutional Convention. Only three women were elected to the 1982-86 Assembly, all new faces: Dorothy Dunlop and Mary Simpson for the UUP, and Mary McSorley for the SDLP, the first nationalist woman elected at regional level, though she did not take her seat.

Things had changed by 1996. Of the 110 people elected in the Forum/talks election, fifteen were women – five Sinn Féin, three DUP, three SDLP, two from the Women’s Coalition, one Alliance, and only one from the UUP. The electoral system that year was unique, in that voters chose not individual candidates but pre-approved party lists, so the proportions represent more the preferences of the party leaderships than their supporters.

The Assemblies following the Good Friday Agreement have kept to roughly this level. The 1998 Assembly started with thirteen women and ended with fourteen – five from SF; two SDLP, increasing to three when Annie Courtney replaced John Hume; two UUP; two Women’s Coalition; one Alliance; and one DUP. The 2003 Assembly elections saw success for eighteen women: seven from Sinn Féin (one of whom was replaced by a man when she resigned from the Assembly, and another of whom later resigned from SF); five SDLP; two Alliance (one of whom was appointed Speaker in the Assembly’s last few months); two DUP; and two UUP (both of whom subsequently joined the DUP); and the numbers went up to 19 when Dawn Purvis filled the seat of PUP leader David Ervine after his death.

The four closest races in 2007 involved five women candidates, Michelle McIlveen of the DUP winning by 31 votes in Strangford, Mary Bradley of the SDLP edging out her party colleague Helen Quigley by 101 votes in Foyle, Josephine Deehan of the SDLP losing to the DUP by 358 votes in West Tyrone, and Diane Dodds of the DUP losing her seat to SF by 481 votes in West Belfast.

The overall result in 2007 as in 2003 was eighteen women elected – eight from Sinn Féin, four from the SDLP, three from the DUP, two from Alliance and one from the PUP (now sitting as an Independent). Since then the number has dropped to fifteen, thanks to resignations from the SDLP, DUP and Alliance ranks.

From the figures alone, it’s difficult to judge how easy or difficult it is for women to get viable candidacies in political parties. But one set of figures which I will be crunching after this year’s elections is the comparison between the success rates of male and female candidates in each party. In 2007, the differences were striking. Only for Sinn Féin and the PUP were female candidates actually more likely to be elected than men. The most visibly male party was the UUP, with only one female candidate out of 38 (and she lost, and is not standing this year). This time, apart from the minor socialist parties, the UUP still have the least female slate, though their 10.3% now is better than their 2.6% four years ago.

Of the other parties, the DUP are running slightly more women candidates, 16% this year rather than 13% and SF have also increased from 24% to 27.5%. But the other parties have posted decreases, Alliance down from 39% to 32%, the Green Party down from 31% to 16%, the SDLP rather drastically down from 40% to 14%, and the PUP even more dramatically have gone from two women out of three in 2007 to just one, male, candidate this year. I would expect that we will see fewer women elected in 2011 than in 2007. (The most gender-balanced party are the BNP, one of whose three candidates is a woman, putting them therefore technically ahead of Alliance.)

In this election, the most gender-balanced ballot paper will be in South Down, where four candidates out of eleven are women. (There are also four women candidates in East Belfast and Upper Bann, but more men in both cases.) Immediately to the west in Newry and Armagh, however, voters will be faced with an all-male ballot paper.

Will it make a difference to the election results? Not directly. But democracy can only benefit if those elected are a good reflection of the society they have been chosen to represent. The structure of the Assembly has been designed to take into account the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland; the much more fundamental divide of gender is barely addressed. But it is a matter of huge importance for the sort of society we want to be. Two female MEPs out of three do not mean that emancipation has been achieved; still less four Westminster MPs out of 18.

I know, as a former party election organiser (and a former election agent for two women candidates), that improving the gender balance of your party’s representation is not straightforward. Women themselves are often reluctant to put themselves forward as candidates, and the masculine abuse that sometimes passes for political debate is off-putting. But that should not stop any of us from trying to improve the situation.

i) births and deaths

3 May 1988: death of David Garth, who played Grey in The Highlanders (1966-67) and a Time Lord in Terror of the Autons (1971).

3 May 2004: death of Anthony Ainley, who played the Master from 1981 to 1989.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 May 1969: broadcast of third episode of The War Games. The travellers take refuge in a barn in the American Civil War zone, and the Doctor and Zoe vanish in a transport container.

3 May 1975: broadcast of third episode of Revenge of the Cybermen. The Doctor is sent on a suicide mission to destroy Voga.

3 May 2003: webcast of thirteenth and last episode of Death Comes to Time.

3 May 2008: broadcast of The Poison Sky. The Sontarans are defeated, and Martha joins the Doctor and Donna on the Tardis.

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Delighted to find this eight-part adaptation of Asimov’s famous trilogy, first broadcast by the BBC in 1973. The episodes are an hour long, which is longer than my preferred listening window, but most of them have plot breaks in the middle. The cast list is impressive, especially for us Doctor Who fans – two Masters, a Davros and Sutekh, not to mention Julian Glover, Maurice Denham, Dinsdale Landen, Angela Pleasance and Prunella Scales. The dominant voice of the second half of the story is the Mule, played very memorably by Wolfe Morris, who was Padmasambhava in The Abominable Snowmen. I had not previously heard of William Eedle, who plays Hari Seldon – there isn’t even an IMDB page for him (though there is one for “William Eeedle”). The plotting is not vastly exciting and the talented cast just about manage to make the material work (adopted from the books by Michael Stott, who throws in some comic agricultural scenes for light relief). On the other hand, the background music and sound ambience is very striking – lots of jarring electronic music, which would have sounded very futuristic in 1973 and still sounds suitably futuristic in a 1970s way.

It also is very very clearly one of the inspirations for Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide. I think Adams, as an sf fan, would have appreciated this but also been somewhat disappointed, and the Encyclopedia Galactica (itself of course referenced by Adams) is an obvious source – providing framing description, introduced by its own little twiddle, words spoken by an actor who is otherwise separate from the action. Adams’ genius was to take this model and subvert it so memorably. This audio version of the Foundation trilogy, rather more than the original books, is a crucial seed text for Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Thanks to for pointing it out in the first place.

i) births and deaths

2 May 1941: birth of Paul Darrow, who played played Captain Hawkins in Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970) and Tekker in Timelash (1985).

ii) broadcast, publishing and webcast anniversaries

2 May 1964: broadcast of “The Snows of Terror”, fourth episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. Ian, Barbara and Susan retrieve the Key despite the efforts of Vasor and the Ice Soldiers. Then Ian finds the last key at their last destination.

2 May 1970: broadcast of seventh episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor and the brigadier intercept Carrington before he is able to implement his plan, and the alien Ambassadors are freed.

2 May 1973: Target Books re-publish the three 1960s Doctor Who novelisations.

2 May 2003: webcast of first episode of Shada. The Eighth Doctor visits Gallifrey to persuade President Romana to come with him to Cambridge.

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i) births and deaths

1 May 1946: birth of Joanna Lumley, who played the Thirteenth Doctor in The Curse of Fatal Death (1999).

1 May 1985: death of George Pravda, who played Denes in The Enemy of the World (1967-68), Jaeger in The Mutants (1972) and Castellan Spandrell in The Deadly Assassin (1976).

1 May 2002: death of John Nathan Turner, producer of Old Who from 1980 to 1989 (and of Dimensions in Time in 1993); controversial and colourful, like him or loathe him, nobody can dispute the depth of his influence on the show.

1 May 2008: death of Bernard Archard, who played Bragen in The Power of the Daleks (1966) and Marcus Scarman in Pyramids of Mars (1975).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

1 May 1965: broadcast of “Dimensions of Time”, second episode of the story we now call The Space Museum. Lobos, leader of the Moroks, starts to hunt down the Tardis crew.

1 May 1971: broadcast of fourth episode of Colony in Space. The Doctor and Jo confront first the Guardian of the primitives and then the Adjudicator, who turns out to be the Master.

1 May 2010: broadcast of Flesh and Stone. The clerics start to disappear, but the Doctor manages to tumble the aliens into the mysterious crack, and then has a narrow escape from Amy.

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 23)
Elizabeth's Irish Wars, by Cyril Falls
A is for Ox, by Lyn Davies
The Unsilent Library: essays on the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who, edited by Simon Bradshaw, Antony Keen and Graham Sleight
Vindication of the Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft
On the Subjection of Women, by John Stuart Mill
In the Heart of the Desert: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, by John Chryssavgis
Toujours Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod
Running Through Corridors, Volume 1: The 60s, by Robert Shearman and Toby Hadoke

Fiction (non-SF) 4 (YTD 19)
The Onion's Our Dumb World: Atlas of the Planet Earth
The Not So Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen, by Mitali Perkins
A Question of Blood, by Ian Rankin
Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence

SF (non-Who) 8 (YTD 25)
Tom's Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce
To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
Year's Best SF 12, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness
Declare, by Tim Powers
Generosity, by Richard Powers
The Time Dissolver, by Jerry Sohl
A Song for Arbonne, by Guy Gabriel Kay

Doctor Who, Torchwood, Sarah Jane, K9 11 (YTD 31)
Department X, by James Goss
K9 and the Time Trap, by David Martin
K9 and the Beasts of Vega, by David Martin
K9 and the Zeta Rescue, by David Martin
K9 and the Missing Planet, by David Martin
Judgement of the Judoon, by Colin Brake
Blood Heat, by Jim Mortimore
Doctor Who Annual 1983
The Face Eater, by Simon Messingham
More Short Trips, ed. Stephen Cole
Deadly Download, by Jason Arnopp

Comics 3 (YTD 6)
The Tides of Time, (mostly) by Steve Parkhouse
Kuifje in Amerika / Tintin in America, by Hergé
Tintin and Alph-Art, by Hergé

~8,500 pages (YTD ~28,800)
5/34 (YTD 14/104) by women (Wollstonecraft, Perkins, Pearce, Willis, Cramer; Lyn Davies is a man)
1/34 (YTD 6/104) by PoC (Perkins)
Owned for more than a year: 10 (To Say Nothing of the Dog [reread], In the Heart of the Desert, Year's Best SF 12, The Time Dissolver, Toujours Tingo, The Face Eater, A Question of Blood, Blood Heat, The Onion's Our Dumb World: 73rd Edition: Atlas of the Planet Earth, Lady Chatterley's Lover).
Also reread: The Tides of Time, in that I read most of it on first publication in DWM (YTD 16/104)

Programmed reads: 18 from 17 lists.
a) Toujours Tingo (non-fiction in order of entry)
c) Vindication of the Rights of Women/On the Subjection of Women (non-fiction by popularity on LJ poll)
d) Our Dumb World, Lady Chatterley's Lover (non-genre books by entry order)
f) Lady Chatterley's Lover (non-genre fiction by popularity on LJ poll)
g) Year's Best SF 12 (sf anthologies in order of entry)
h) The Time Dissolver (sf non-anthologies in order of entry)
k) To Say Nothing of the Dog (Hugo winners in sequence, now concluded)
i) and j) A Song for Arbonne (sf in order of LT popularity, sf by popularity on LJ poll) 
j) Tom's Midnight Garden (sf by popularity on LJ poll) 
l) Blood Heat (New Adventures in sequence)
m) The Face Eater (Eighth Doctor Adventures in sequence)
n) Judgement of the Judoon (New Who books by LT popularity)
o) More Short Trips (other Old Who by popularity)
q) A Question of Blood (Rankin's Rebus novels, in order)
r) Elizabeth's Irish Wars (Tudors and Ireland)
s) The Not So Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen (books by PoC in order of entry)
u) In the Heart of the Desert (unreviewed books acquired from 2006 on in entry order)

Coming next, possibly:

The Alexiad, by Anna Comnena (already started)
The Shaping of Middle-Earth by J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Tolkien
Spenser's The Faerie Queen – A Selection of Critical Essays ed. by Peter C. Bayley
Speaking in Tongues by Ian McDonald
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Complete Book of "Thunderbirds" by Chris Bentley (if I can find it)
Questioning the Millennium by Stephen Jay Gould
History of the Spanish Inquisition by Joseph Perez
When Santa Fell to Earth by Cornelia Funke
Fleshmarket Close by Ian Rankin
Eerste Keer by Sibylline
Doctor Who: Aliens And Enemies by Justin Richards
Dimension Riders by Daniel Blythe
The Taint by Michael Collier
Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
State of Change by Christopher Bulis

This is a book about watching the whole of Doctor Who in sequence, so of course it appealed to me. It is structured as correspondence between Robert Shearman, author of the Christopher Ecclestone episode Dalek, and Toby Hadoke, author of Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf and moderator of numerous recent DVD commentaries, spaced over the course of 2009, with the intention being to start on 1 January with An Unearthly Child and finish with The End of Time part 1 on 31 December. This first volume covers the 1960s, ie the entire Hartnell and Troughton period plus the two Peter Cushing films, at a rate of (usually) two episodes a day.

During a week when my ability to concentrate on long texts was not of its usual quality, the structure of this book was absolutely perfect for me, with each individual episode getting about a page of discussion. It helps of course that it’s less than a year since I finished rewatching this period of the show myself, so it was all pretty fresh for me. (I just hope they don’t publish the other two volumes before I’ve finished my own rewatch – spoilers!) Shearman writes of “that aghast expression that a classic Doctor Who fan affects when he knows that something on screen is rubbish, and he’s painfully aware that all the non-fans watching with are about to glance over, in unison, to see if he’s noticed how terible it is.” But you can feel in safe company here. Both Shearman and Hadoke are deep deep fans of the show and email each other with tidbits of information for the reader which I am sure were known to both of them. Both are witty and amusing writers; Hadoke occasionally deteriorates into awful puns, but makes up for this by contributing his knowledge of stagecraft and the stage.

Their mission is to try and say something positive about each episode, and they generally succeed (with understandable lapses for The Sensorites and The Dominators). Sometimes I wished they had found a little more charity for, for instance, the mid-parts of The Daleks’ Master Plan. Sometimes their enthusiasm surprised me – Hadoke’s love for the second Cushing film, for instance. But I also cheered when our tastes coincided, for instance with the wonderful Power of the Daleks. And anyway, these things are personal and not objective; Hadoke explains in detail the very specific reasons why Fury From the Deep is a special story for him which he can never evaluate neutrally.

I’m within a few months of finishing my own Doctor Who rewatch (suggested to me in 2008 by Paul Cornell, but started only in September 2009) but I think this books will be very much enjoyed even by those who feel that it’s a step too far to do it themselves. You can easily dip in and check out particular stories that may interest you, and the writing is generally chatty and lucid. Very strongly recommended to the thinking Old Who fan.

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I’m glad to see that despite the sad loss of Elisabeth Sladen there remains a certain amount of Sarah Jane material for me to absorb, even before the BBC decide what to do with the already filmed material for the fifth series. This is a cracking good yarn, told (like all the SJA audios) by Sladen as SJS in the first person, about an alien menace which controls people by persuading them to download it. That basically tells you all you need to know; a neat little parable for our times, with decent character time for both Sarah and Luke (less so for Clyde and Rani), nicely produced and generally satisfactory.

Me: The city’s changed a fair bit in the last thirty years.

Driver: It surely has. (Indicates the junction of Ormeau Road and Donegall Pass.) See them traffic lights? In 1973 I rammed through them lights and slammed on the brakes, because there was two men pointing a gun at my head. They called me up from the depot at [St] George’s Market, cause they knew they’d get a Catholic taxi driver that way, and then they pointed a gun at my head and told me to take them to Sandy Row for my ‘last drink’. But I slammed on the brakes – lucky I had a seat belt, not every car had one back then – and the lad with the gun went through the windscreen, and his mate in the back got out the car and they both legged it, leaving the gun just lying there in the middle of the road. I never heard nothing back from the police, I don’t believe they ever investigated it.

Me (somewhat gobsmacked): And you kept up driving taxis ever since?

Driver: No, after that I couldn’t do it any more; my nerves couldn’t take it. I only started on the taxis again five years ago, I was driving lorries for years. But it’s a lonely life, and I was smoking too many cigarettes cos there’s nothing else to do in the cab of the lorry all day. That’ll be £5.20, sir, enjoy the weather, looks like it’s a smashing day.

Another of the late 1990s BBC anthologies of short stories about the first eight Doctors. Standouts for me: “64 Carlisle Street”, by Gary Russell, featuring the First Doctor, Steven and Dodo; “Special Weapons”, by Paul Leonard, with Mel and the Seventh Doctor; and “Good Companions” by Peter Anghelides, featuring Tegan and a future Doctor with red hair. Wooden spoon to Gareth Roberts, whose “Return of the Spiders” with the Fourth Doctor, K9 and Romana is really awful; Roberts can do much better than this and usually does.

One of those famous books which I had never actually read – I did leaf through Hunt Emerson’s graphic novel adaptation a few years back but wasn’t really engaged, and actually my memory is that he gets one very important part of the story completely wrong, which is that Sir Clifford Chatterley is only a few years older than the young Lady Chatterley.

It is a good book – Constance, stuck in a hasty marriage with a man who has been disabled in the war, finds lust and then love with Mellors, the gamekeeper; she basically grows out of the role that society (embodied in her sister rather then her father, who is somewhat subversive for a knight of the realm) and heads for what is practically a happy ending. The world has moved on from the 1920s, of course, and it’s largely a social parable of its time, but memorable for all that. I was impressed that Constance had had a number of lovers before Mellors came along; I was also struck by Lawrence’s rather negative portrayal of the Irish characters (all Trinity graduates, no doubt).

It seems a bit weird from the viewpoint of 2011 to think that this book was once considered too obscene to publish in the United Kingdom and various other jurisdictions. The jarring use of language for today’s reader is actually not the explicit sex but Mellors’ conscious affectation of Derbyshire dialect; I think attitudes towards speech patterns have now changed to the extent that this would seem patronising both from the author and from the character in a book published today. The obscenities can be found in any bookshop, or many corners of the internet, and are not really shocking at all.

Anyway, glad I finally read this at last.

i) broadcast anniversaries

30 April 1966: broadcast of “A Holiday for the Doctor”, first episode of the story we now call The Gunfighters. The Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 in search of a dentist.

30 April 2005: broadcast of Dalek. The Doctor and Rose encounter a captive Dalek in 2012 America.

30 April 2011: broadcast of Day of the Moon.

ii) date almost specified in canon

30 April, some time in the 1970s: most of the events of The Dæmons (1971).

Two more months to go of this project. I’m very grateful to David Haddock for suggesting a way of making it a permanent installation with Google Calendar; would be glad of any further offers of help in making it happen!

broadcast anniversaries

29 April 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Faceless Ones. Jamie gets on a Chameleon plane, which is duly captured by the aliens.

29 April 1972: broadcast of fourth episode of The Mutants. The Marshal plans to bombard Solos with ionising rockets; Varan and his men prevent him but the Skybase is damaged.

29 April 2006: broadcast of School Reunion. The Tenth Doctor unexpectedly meets Sarah Jane Smith, thirty years on. (Sob!)

• PUNKADIDDLE: Ian Watson, Miracle Visitors (1978)
  Adam Roberts disagrees with me on <b>The Miracle Visitors</b>.
  (tags: sf)
• YouTube – Existential Star Wars (In French)
  "Life begins on the other side of despair", says R2D2 trundling away over the dunes.
  (tags: sf funny)

Another lesser-known Tintin book, this time from the exact opposite end of Hergé’s career: this is the story he was working on when he died in 1983. It is a strange and convoluted tale – Captain Haddock wakes from a nightmare, goes shopping and almost accidentally buys a giant plastic letter H, a piece of a new sculpture style called ‘Alph-Art’ (hence the title of the book); mysteriously dead art experts and a new age cult which may be led by Rastapopoulos in disguise bring Tintin and Captain Haddock to an island near Naples, where Tintin is captured by the bad guys and told that he will be drowned in liquid plastic and put on display as a sculpture by the (fictional) artist César. He tries to send a message to Captain Haddock via Snowy, but then the guards come for him:

“Come on, it’s time to turn you into a ‘César’.”

And that’s the end of the Adventures of Tintin; he faces the dreadful fate of being transformed into an icon for the ages.

It’s fairly obvious what would have happened if Hergé had lived to finish the story – our hero will escape thanks to his friends, and it’s also clear that the bad guys are planning a reunion of a lot of incidental characters from previous books, some from a very long time ago. The book already features Bianca Castafiore, Professor Calculus, Jolyon Wagg, Thomson and Thompson and the Emir of Khedad and his horrible little son Abdullah. It’s also fairly clear that the book would have needed a good bit of revision – there’s an inconsistency in the plot between whether the art gallery is bugged with a reel-to-reel tape recorder (which would already have been old-fashioned at the time of writing) or via a high-tech microphone hidden in Mrs Vandezande’s jewel. (By coincidence, a Mr Vandezande has been the mayor of our village since the last local government reform in 1976.) but the germ of a good if not great Tintin story is already there.

We also get some of Hergé’s rough drafts for ways the story might have gone: drugs conspiracies based in Amsterdam, Captain Haddock’s change of personality, various options for bringing back some fairly obscure names from the past. Hergé clearly saw this as a final volume, and perhaps it’s better to have it preserved in mid-thought, rather than some slightly synthetic confection of a final product; Edwin Drood and Sunset at Blandings are not bad precedents.

If you are in or near London tomorrow and wanting to avoid the television for any reason, I can heartily recommend the Doctor Who Experience at Kensington Olympia, who are offering “a limited number of tickets” at the knockdown rate of £4.29 per person. There’s an excellent multimedia show which lasts for about half an hour, then a decent exhibition covering both Old and New Who (including the authentic Tardis exterior and console from the 1980s). It’s worth the standard £20, just about. (I can’t see how to book the cheap tickets on the website; probably you’d have to phone them.)

This is one of the three pre-war Tintin books which are not in general circulation in English, and for fairly good reason; it’s not all that good. Tintin goes to America in 1931, briefly captures Al Capone (who was still just about at liberty in real life at that stage), is himself captured by the Blackfoot tribe, and then has a series of unlikely and disjointed adventures ending with him rolling up the entire Chicago Syndicate of Gansters and sent back to Belgium as a hero. The only African-Americans in the book (at least in the current version) are lynched off-screen (apparently even this is omitted in the English translation), and the Blackfoot are kicked off their land because Tintin discovers oil on it; Hergé is at least offering a critique of racism, though not a very elegant one. It’s interesting as a fore-runner of the much better stuff to come. It’s a very long time since I last read Cigars of the Pharaoh, the next album in sequence, but my memory is that it is a massive upshift in quality and coherence compared with this.

This year’s Hugo shortlist for the Best Short Story category is rather easy to digest – there are only four nominees (presumably there was a multiple tie for fifth place among the nominations), all of them are already available online, and one of them is very short indeed; to further simplify matters I had already read one which had been nominated for the BSFA award. Since I’m spending a few days horizontal and unable to concentrate on anything of great length, I have formulated my views as follows:

4) "Amaryllis", by Carrie Vaughn. Nice enough writing style, but the plot is simply that the bloke in charge of weighing the fishing catch is cheating, against the background of a society where fertility has been restricted; I didn’t spot any connection between plot and setting (perhaps there is one and I’m not alert enough to notice it right now) and didn’t think the setting, which is the more interesting bit, was sufficiently developed. Not a bad story per se but three out of four BSFA nominees (and three our of four Hugo nominees) are much better.

3) "Ponies", by Kij Johnson. A brilliant, but horrible, very short story about little girls mutilating their familiar spirits as a rite of passage. On a literary level it may well be the best of the nominees (edited to add: and won the Nebula), but I somehow wasn’t in the frame of mind to appreciate tales of bits being cut off defenceless creatures.

2) "The Things", by Peter Watts. I put this top of my BSFA ballot, but forgot about it when it came to Hugo nominations. It’s a re-telling of John Carpenter’s film The Thing from the point of view of the Thing itself, and convincingly conveys the alien entity’s disgust with humanity, and its own efforts to work out what is actually going on make an effective counterpoint to the efforts of the humans to defeat it.

1) "For Want of a Nail", by Mary Robinette Kowal. A memorable story about a rogue AI which goes rogue for the best of motives, protecting its closest human friend from the ruthless euthanasia laws of his society, told from the point of view of the young relative who exposes them. I normally hate cute robots – and the fact that this one is called Cordelia did not help – but I found this a strong contrast with, say, "Amaryllis" in that plot and setting are intertwined and explored in the best sfnal tradition.

I’ll be happy enough as long as "Amaryllis" doesn’t win, but my vote goes to Kowal.

(Previous Hugo category write-up: Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.)

I’ve had a rather horizontal and painful week so far. I referred a bit cryptically the other day to a minor but inconvenient medical complaint: this was a swollen haemorrhoid, which I’ve suffered from a couple of times before, so I knew the drill: take the pills, slather on the ointment, and it gets better in a week or so.

However, this time it didn’t work like that; though things improved as I had expected over the course of last week, it suddenly seemed to get worse over Easter weekend, and when I went to see the doctor on Tuesday morning, her sharp intake of breath as she inspected the affected area told me that I wasn’t malingering. She scheduled me for surgery as quickly as possible, which turned out to be yesterday afternoon.

Well, any procedure that starts with sharp needles filled with anaesthetic being stuck into a bit of you that is already swollen and sore is an unpleasant experience. That was bad enough; what was worse was that after I got home, I realised I was still bleeding very badly from the wound (no stitches, given where it is), and had to go back to the hospital again for further treatment (yet more sharp needles in sensitive places).

Anyway, I’m staying firmly horizontal today and working my way through the Hugo-nominated films – I don’t even have the concentration to read much, which is a bit alarming. But I do already feel better than I did this time yesterday, let alone last night. Still, ow ow ow.

i) births and deaths

28 April 1977: death of Anthony Coburn, who wrote An Unearthly Child (1963) and the never-produced story The Masters of Luxor.

i) broadcast anniversaries

28 April 1973: broadcast of fourth episode of Planet of the Daleks. The Doctor and Jo are reunited, and the Thals disagree about how to tackle the Daleks.

28 April 2007: broadcast of Evolution of the Daleks. The Daleks’ experiments are destroyed by the Doctor and Dalek Caan escapes.

ii) date specified in canon

28 April 2008: Martha Jones and Sarah Jane Smith are killed on the Moon, in the negated timeline in Turn Left (2008)

• Royal Wedding Dalek
  Does what it says.
  (tags: doctorwho funny)

I usually spend about ten seconds every morning looking at Wikipedia’s death notices, on the basis that roughly once a year I find out from there that someone I knew, or knew of, has passed away. This morning, however, I discovered the story of the 4th Baron Ampthill, who owed his seat in the House of Lords to his mother successfully arguing (the House of Lords overruling a jury verdict against her on a technicality) that she had had a ten-month pregnancy while still a virgin. (The Daily Telegraph, inevitably, has even more juicy details.)

On the one hand, one has to feel sorry for the young Geoffrey Russell, who was best known for most of his life – particularly his childhood – because of the very public dispute between his supposed parents about the circumstances of his conception. This was quite literally the kind of case for which privacy laws were written. Whatever one may think of the current fuss about superinjunctions (and to be honest, I can’t really maintain a lot of excitement about Andrew Marr’s private life, or see how the public interest is in any way served by reporting it), it’s surely fairly obvious that it is right to restrict reporting of the gory details of divorce cases where there are young children involved. My impression, though I don’t know for sure, is that in Belgium things are a bit calmer because of the right to privacy enshrined in article 22 of the Constitution. (Though we still get ludicrously obsessive coverage of murder trials and the like.)

On the other hand, it’s completely indefensible and utterly absurd that, purely because his supposed father was unable to disprove his mother’s story of a virgin ten-month pregnancy, Mr Russell was able to sit in the parliament of the United Kingdom as the legislator Lord Ampthill from 1973 until he died a few days ago. I’m sure he was a terribly nice chap and all that, but there are a lot of terribly nice chaps and chapesses out there who would have done at least as good a job. I’m a sceptic on some of the current ideas for House of Lords reform, but cannot see any argument for retaining any hereditary element at all.

Peter Anghelides and David Bishop – particularly nice to read these as I enjoyed their stories featuring her very much.

i) births and deaths

27 April 1963 (incorrectly recorded here earlier this month as 17 April): birth of Russell T. Davies, head writer and executive producer of the first five years of New Who (2005-10) and author of Virgin New Adventure Damaged Goods (1996).

ii) broadcast anniversary

27 April 1968: broadcast of first episode of The Wheel in Space. The Tardis lands on a deserted spaceship; the controller of the nearby Wheel prepares to destroy it.

27 April 1974: broadcast of sixth episode of The Monster of Peldon. The Ice Warriors are defeated and the miners are reconciled with the Queen.

iii) date specified in canon

27 April 1986 or 1987: birth of Rose Tyler.