One of those classic political texts which everyone should read, written in the revolutionary moment of 1792, and making the daring argument that women should be educated rather than infantilised, indeed, boys and girls should be educated together. Many of her arguments are unfortunately still valid; her analysis of power and oppression is pretty acute, and must be one of the earliest examples of applying arguments about socieo-economic equality to gender relations. I was interested that she clearly has a great deal of respect for Talleyrand, who I’d always thought of as wily statesman rather than advanced political thinker in his own right, which may just show my ignorance.

I was startled by a line in the introduction by Pamela Frankau, who writes that “with feminism we are surely done. It went out – didn’t it? – some twenty-five years ago.” This was written in 1954. I’m glad to say that a second reading (not sitting in the warm sunshine) reassured me that she was being ironic.

Well, did warn me

This short (170 pages) and digestible book of essays on the Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who was published last month by the Science Fiction Foundation; the editors kindly invited me to contribute when it was first mooted two years ago, and I wish I had had the time (and scholarly resources) to do so, as it is always nice to be in good company (two of the three editors and are also contributors).

To run through the contents: we start with a foreword by Robert Shearman about what it felt like to bring the Daleks back. It’s a story he has told before, but he tells it well, and it’s worth reading again. The editors then give a brief introduction noting the unexpected impact of the show under RTD, and summarising the articles. The articles themselves are as follows:

1) "The Big Picture Show: Russell T. Davies’ Writing for Doctor Who", by Graham Sleight, analyses how Davies gets away with breaking some of the ‘rules’ of writing and yet manages (usually) to turn out very successful product, by his use of spectacle, emotion, fast pacing and scale, but also by distancing himself from ‘science fiction’ as it is usually understood and interpreted.

2) "The Reasons and Functions behind the Use of Deus ex Machina in Series One of the New Doctor Who", by Paul Hawkins, is more readable than its title suggests, and looks one particular aspect of Davies’ writing which breaks the ‘rules’, his use of endings which don’t actually tell us more about the characters but usually work anyway.

3) "He’s not the Messiah: Undermining Political and Religious Authority in New Doctor Who, by Una McCormack, looks at the subversive tendencies of New Who in political terms using a lot of ideas from Foucault which more or less made sense to me, and then looks also at the way in which Davies, who is not shy about his own atheism, repeatedly uses religious imagery to tremendous effect in New Who. I’d have added to this the point that the Ninth Doctor came to us at Easter 2005, and the Tenth was revealed in his full manifestation on Christmas Day that year, which may not have been completely planned by Davies but is perhaps also germane.

4) "Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?", by Tony Keen, argues very strongly that only Sarah Jane Smith, of the whole range of Old Who companions, could have been brought back for School Reunion, and looks at the fates of all other companions to examine what this tells us about the weaknesses and strengths of the show’s set-up – probably the essay that will most gladden the hearts of Old Who fans.

5) "How Donna Noble Saved the Universe (and Had to Pay for It)", by Sydney Duncan and Andy Duncan, examines the fate of Donna in Journey’s End and goes in some depth into why it isn’t really a satisfactory ending for her, given her role in the story, the Doctor’s own abilities (note how the humanised Doctor doesn’t get mind-wiped or destroyed) and the viewers’ (well, these viewers’) expectations for how women characters should be portrayed. I would add that it’s not terribly satisfactory in dramatic terms either, and not relly helped by her reappearance in The End of Time.

6) "Does the Doctor Dance? Heterosexuality, Omnisexuality, and Spontaneous Generation in the Whoniverse", by Catherine Coker, rather joyously examines sex and relationships in New Who and Torchwood, the only essay in the book to really look at either spinoff series.

7) "Conflict, Hybridity and Forgiveness", by James Rose, is again a better essay than its title, considering the Ninth and Tenth Doctors as sharing a single character arc from trauma to healing, and looking at the role of hybrid creatures (the Daleks, the humanised Doctor) in that process.

8) "The Importance of Language Converted to Knowledge in the Arsenal of the Tenth Doctor", by Leslie McMurtry,
is a very entertaining and informative look at the way in which the Doctor takes other people’s words and learning and uses them to win; while the essay mainly looks at the obvious Tenth Doctor stories, McMurtry makes the point that it is a long-running theme in Old Who too.

9) "Philosophies of Time Travel in the New Doctor Who", by Richard Burley, takes a rather sober approach to the way in which time travel actually "works" in the Whoniverse. Burley acknowledges that Steven Moffat’s approach in the RTD era was different, and of course Moffat-era time travel has turned out to work by Moffat’s rules rather than RTD’s. This was one essay that might have benefited also from an engagement with Old Who, which also had a variety of approaches to this (compare The Aztecs, The Space Museum, Earthshock, Mawdryn Undead, just as the first examples that came to my mind).

10)"Approaching Character in New Doctor Who", by Clare Parody, provides tools for analysing why characters are written the way they are in New Who, particularly considering how it has become extensible as well as unfolding, with cheerful violence to continuity and spinoff shows and other phenomena. I hope that a future essay will go a bit more into the other manifestations of Who, including the stage shows which have now become almost routine.

Although the focus of the book is on the five years of the Russell T. Davies era – from Easter 2005 to New Year’s Day 2010 – almost all of the authors seem pretty solidly committed to looking at Who not only with the tools of interpretation of contemporary media and literature, but also as a phenomemon which started in 1963 rather than 2005, and indeed which continues past Davies’ handing over the reins to Steven Moffat in 2010. For old school fans like me this is rather comforting, and hopefully it may tempt any New Who fans who pick it up and have not yet been converted to give Old Who a try as context. In any case it’s a very good set of essays, more profound than Chicks Dig Time Lords, more diverse than Triumph of a Time Lord, and better than any of the other analytical books I’ve read about New Who.

Gibbon takes four and a half pages to tell us what will be in the next 24 chapters, and then takes 55 pages to cover 550 years of Byzantine emperors.

If you head to the next village south of us, and wander out to the west a little, you will find a mysterious ridge departing the village in a northwesterly direction, roughly here. F and I cycled down to find it yesterday, and he took this picture of it from the road:

What could this mysterious structure be? A dike? Unlikely, give its relationship with the river Dijle, not 25 metres away and intersecting it diagonally. A disused road? Well, there are plenty of used roads around, and this one doesn’t appear to go anywhere.

But if you trace the ridge back into the village, you will eventually find that opposite the railway station (itself somewhat dilapidated) is this building (ignore the strange man in red shorts checking his Blackberry):

This, believe it or not, is the former station in Sint-Joris-Weert of the steam tram line which ran between Tervuren and Tienen from 1905 to 1957. If you look over the door you can still see where the name “Sint-Joris-Weert” would have been written, over half a century ago.

An easy enough Saturday outing. All photos taken by young F.

Good if somewhat gloomy selection of short SF first published in 2006; the only one I had read before was Michael Flynn’s “Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth”, which was also the only one of the 26 stories here to make it to either Hugo or Nebula shortlist (though the Locus Best Novelette winner, Cory Doctorow’s “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, is also here). Other stories here that I liked included Gardner Dozois’ “Counterfactual” and Carol Emshwiller’s “Quill”. 2007 was the year when I wasn’t able to write up the various Hugo nominees in my usual detail, but my main memory is that they were a bit more cheerful; winners were “A Billion Eves” by Robert Reed, “The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian Mcdonald and “Impossible Dream” by Tim Pratt.

broadcast anniversaries

10 April 1965: broadcast of “The Wheel of Fortune”, third episode of the story we now call The Crusade. Barbara remains a captive; the Doctor is forced to reveal Vicki’s true gender.

10 April 1971: broadcast of first episode of Colony in Space. The Time Lords send the Doctor and Jo to a colony planet where the Doctor is attacked by a robot.

• How We Have Changed
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More spinoff literature, this time the latest installment in the series of audio plays about Romana II, Leela and K9 Mark II (Mark I came to an apparently sticky end, but somehow escaped to make his own Australian TV series). The third series in this line, which came out a whole five years ago, got a bit caught up in its own continuity and one felt almost a bit revived when our heroes fled from a devastated Gallifrey to make their way elsewhere in the universe. This fourth series has a very clever premise: each of the four stories explores an alternate Gallifrey where Time Lord history took a different path to the original timeline. Some time ago, Big Finish did a series of plays called Doctor Who: Unbound looking at alternative Doctors, and this is along those lines; it doesn’t require much knowledge of the previous three series, other than that Romana has been President of the Time Lords, Leela has been struck blind, and their allies from their home world are the obscure Irving Braxiatel and former Citadel securocrat Narvin.

The first story, Gallifrey: Reborn by Gary Hopkins, brings us to a world where Time Lords are mercenary and ultra-capitalist, trading regenerations with each other; and Mary Tamm plays a Romana who never left with the Doctor, while Leela is celebrated as the Doctor’s companion during the quest for the Key to Time to the point of being made President with K9 as her Castellan. It all ends in disaster of course. Conrad Westmaas, who several years ago had played audio companion C’rizz for Big Finish, is much more comfortable here as Romana’s rising young Time Lord son. We had Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward spark against each other as the two Romanas in earlier Gallifrey plays, but this takes a gloomier look at the dynamic.

Gallifrey: Disassembled by Justin Richards brings us to a world where the Time Lords are actively interventionist in the time lines and, frankly, evil: the power-hungry President Romana, aided by Leela, her Interrogator-General, keeps a tight grip on matters; and what of the character played by Colin Baker who responds to, but doesn’t like being called, the name “Doctor”? There’s a lot of continuity-style speculation also about the true relationship between Braxiatel and the Doctor, and a rather odd rule of Time about meeting someone who you killed in a different timestream (never heard of this before, and it’s flatly contradicted in the fourth play in the series), which weakens the promising start of the story, but it is still fun.

Gallifrey: Annihilation by Gary Russell and Scott Handcock takes us to a devastated, depopulated Gallifrey, where one of the oldest Time Lord conflicts, resolved æons ago in our more familiar timeline, is still continuing. One of the disadvantages of paying for the downloads but not the CDs is that you miss out on the cast lists for each, and I found myself trying to work out why Magistrix Borusa sounded so familiar: turns out she is actually Katy Manning, playing what she describes as her own voice with no Jo Grant perkiness or Iris Wildthyme bawdiness, and doing it rather well. Other guest stars include Geoffrey Beevors as Lord Prydon, who may or may not be an alternate and altered Master; Wendy Padbury’s daughter Charlie Hayes; and co-author and director Gary Russell, in a rare appearance as performing artist (though of course we should remember that his career began as Dick of the Famous Five in 1978).

Gallifrey: Forever again starts with an alternate Romana who is a ruthless ruler of Gallifrey, but she is assassinated in the first couple of minutes, and ‘our’ Romana then has to work out what is going on in this slave-owning, non-time-travelling society, posing as its president, under the vicious supervision of the alternate Narvin who works out pretty quickly what is going on. The voice from the past this time is Carole Ann Ford, playing one of the slave labourers working on the Eye of Harmony (and John Leeson gets to do a different funny voice, a couple of other characters from the previous Gallifrey series return in alternate form). We end up with a situation which liberates Leela either to go into the three Companion Chronicle audios by Nigel Fairs which kill her off, or else for more adventures first.

Author David Wise, I note with interest, is one of only two contributors to the Doctor Who franchise to have also written an episode of televised Star Trek, co-writing the 1974 animated episode “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth”, which became the first and only episode of so-called “classic era” Star Trek to win an Emmy Award. (The other such writer is , who co-wrote the 1987 TNG episode “Where No One Has Gone Before” and has had at least three Who short stories published.)

All in all, I think the four audios are relatively approachable considering that they come after three series of a spinoff line of plays. Lalla Ward and Louise Jameson, of course, carry it, greatly helped by John Leeson and in the first two plays by Miles Richardson’s Braxiatel. But I think any fan with a vague knowledge of the standard Whoniverse timeline of Gallifrey should be able to enjoy these. See also reviews by Andrew Hickey and here and here.

These four books, published in 1980, tell the further adventures of K9 Mark I as troubleshooter for the Time Lords, flying around the galaxy in his miniature spaceship the K-NEL. (“Kennel”, geddit?) They are available on the DVD of K9 and Company, and I suppose constitute the first spinoff Who novels (as opposed to the Dalek Annuals), years in advance of Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma or Harry Sullivan’s War. Although half of the rather meagre 36 pages of each book are illustrations, the artwork is absolutely gorgeous; the art credits are given to “R.C.S. Enterprises Ltd” and I wonder which gifted artist’s name lies behind those initials. The books cost 65p each at the time, which the Bank of England assures me is only £2.17 in today’s money, good value for the art alone.

April Books 7) K9 and the Time Trap

The first of the books is the most interesting from a continuity point of view. K9, investigating some mysterious spaceship disappearances, allows himself to be caught by the eponymous Time Trap and is transported to “an immense museum of space exploration, with craft from every civilisation ever to have leapt the stars.” The proprietor of this museum turns out to be a bloke in a funny helmet called Omegon (see right), who says that he has met K9’s Master, reveals that he was once a Time Lord but was betrayed, and indeed

He had been a great engineer. It was he who had created the system that gave the Time Lords time-travel. ‘I harnessed the power of a thousand suns for them,’ he said. ‘They made me emperor – then plotted to destroy me, and marooned me here! They think I am trapped in this crimson bubble of time,’ roared Omegon, ‘but soon I shall have my revenge!’

K9 deals with him pretty rapidly after that, but it’s obvious who Omegon is meant to be, especially considering who wrote The Three Doctors. (For other Omega revivals see the excellent Big Finish audio Omega, and Arc of Infinity which I’m less wild about but will reach in my rewatch very soon.)

April Books 8) K9 and the Beasts of Vega

Here we have K9 sent to investigate an outbreak of catatonic insanity among the crew of spaceships working in the Vega system; he is assisted (all too briefly) by a Professor Romius (see left, so obviously not Romana). In the end K9 saves the day by taking over the mind of the (unnamed) spaceship captain using his extendable data probe, something we’ve never seen him do before or since, to appreciate what the humanoid crew are experiencing (which that they are under attack by the Beasts of Vega). These turn out to be imaginary monsters playing on emotion; K9 having no emotion is smugly immune, which rather oddly twists the Cybermen’s weakness into being an advantage. As it turns out, however, this is setting up that audacious concept, a character arc for K9, to be developed in the next two books

April Books 9) K9 and the Zeta Rescue

Another day, another crisis: K9 is sent to investigate vast explosions in the Zeta Cancri system (also referred to Zeta Four Sector) where it is feared that if the stars collide the whole galactic neighbourhood will be devastated. (I checked, and ζ Cancri is indeed a well-known and complex multiple star system, though of course any the consequences of two of the stars colliding would be neither as immediate or as widely devastating as the book would have it.) Here for the first time we see the Time Lords who give K9 his orders, and they are indeed a rum bunch (see right), though reminiscent of the Time Lord Council we were to encounter shortly in The Tides of Time.

The plot is a bit unfocussed: K9 finds a vast prison ship and an attractive young prisoner called Dea (see left); he frees her, and she explains that they are witnessing the last stages of a war between the Telians and Megallans; K9 and Dea then watch as the two sides’ leaders mutually destroy each other. K9, having not actually done anything to resolve the crisis, then stays behind to help Dea care for the remaining victims, explaining to the Time Lords on his return that he was aiming to improve his “understanding of the humanoid race”, though with negative results. It’s an interesting counterpart to the previous book in that K9 appears to feel that his lack of emotions is a potential disability after all.

April Books 10) K9 and the Missing Planet

The last is the most political of the books: K9 is called in to assist the capitalist, colonialist leadership of the heavily polluted planet Tellus (or, as we call it, Earth) to track down a missing colony.

‘It’s not there,’ snarled the president [see right]. ‘It should be there and it’s gone. The whole planet, gone. We own that planet, we’ve invested billions in it, and we need its raw materials to fuel our power plants and supply our factories. Tellac Inc wants it back. Apart from that they tell me it’s playing havoc with navigation … 0h, and there are a dozen families missing too. Miners, it says here. You better get it back!’

K9 gets caught in a timewarp and finds the missing planet and miners, who are constructing a new Eden with animals from all periods of geological history which they survey by balloon. Votri, the miners’ leader, begs K9 to keep his secret; and K9 does so, in defiance of his orders, reporting back to Gallifrey only that the planet has “disappeared from the universe as we know it”.

A couple of general observations. Martin is clearly keen on using real star systems – the first book features Rigellian spaceships, the second Vega, the third Zeta Cancri, and the fourth Earth. He’s also keen on Greek letters – Zeta and Omega/Omegon, also the Doctor’s Gallifreyan name of Theta Sigma, first used in The Armageddon Factor and referred to again several times here. I note that that each book has precisely one other named character (Omegon, Professor Romius, Dea, Votri) which is a bit of a weakness.

However, I do like the mini-character arc of K9 getting to grips with humanity over the last three books; it’s an old sf trope, the robot who deals with these puzzling humans, but I had not really seen it done before for K9. For what they are, this a very pleasing set of books.

broadcast anniversaries

9 April 1966: broadcast of “The Hall of Dolls”, second episode of the story we now call The Celestial Toymaker. Steven and Dodo, competing with the King and Queen of Hearts, must find the two safe chairs to sit in.

9 April 2005: broadcast of The Unquiet Dead. The Doctor and Rose, with the help of Charles Dickens, investigate reanimating corpses in Cardiff in 1869.

• synecdochic: LiveJournal's DDoS and Russian Politics
  I must say I am favourably impressed by the positive and supportive attitude taken by Dreamwidth's team to LJ's recent problems.
  (tags: livejournal)
• New Kosovo president Jahjaga sets a precedent – Monsters and Critics
  35-year-old policewoman becomes president!
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Why would one want or use a tumblr account?

broadcast anniversaries

8 April 1967: broadcast of first episode of The Faceless Ones. The Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie land at Gatwick Airport to get mixed up in an affair of vanishing corpses; Polly is apparently brainwashed.

8 April 1972: broadcast of first episode of The Mutants. Geoffrey Palmer is the best thing in this story and he gets killed before the end of this episode; five more to go, folks…

• Medvedev criticizes illegal attack on his blog | Reuters
  Russian President hits out at hackers who mounted DDoS attack on Livejournal.
  (tags: livejournal russia)
•    America: The Grim Truth: Information Clearing House –  ICH
  "Americans, I have some bad news for you: You have the worst quality of life in the developed world – by a wide margin. If you had any idea of how people really lived in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and many parts of Asia, you’d be rioting in the streets calling for a better life. In fact, the average Australian or Singaporean taxi driver has a much better standard of living than the typical American white-collar worker. I know this because I am an American, and I escaped from the prison you call home."
  (tags: usa ushealth politics economics)
• The Strange Horizons Blog: Diana Wynne Jones – A Requiem in Links, reviewed by Horizontal Connections
  Roundup of DWJ tributes.
  (tags: sf)

I have now completed one of my reading projects – to have a write-up on-line, be it ever so humble, of every winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Some of them are mere one-para stubs awaiting expansion if I ever get back to my project of writing up all of the joint Hugo/Nebula winners in detail, but at least they are all there now.

The Mule by Isaac Asimov (Retro, 1946)
Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein (Retro, 1951)
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (1953)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (Retro, 1954)
They’d Rather Be Right (aka: The Forever Machine) by Mark Clifton and Frank Riley (1955)
Double Star by Robert A. Heinlein (1956)
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber (1958)
A Case of Conscience by James Blish (1959)
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein (1960)
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1961)
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1962)
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1963)
Here Gather the Stars (aka: Way Station) by Clifford D. Simak (1964)
The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber (1965)
Dune by Frank Herbert (co-winner, 1966)
…And Call Me Conrad (aka: This Immortal) by Roger Zelazny (co-winner, 1966)
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1967)
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny (1968)
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (1969)
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin (1970)
Ringworld by Larry Niven (1971)
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer (1972)
The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (1973)
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke (1974)
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin (1975)
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1976)
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (1977)
Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1978)
Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre (1979)
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (1980)
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge (1981)
Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh (1982)
Foundation’s Edge by Isaac Asimov (1983)
Startide Rising by David Brin (1984)
Neuromancer by William Gibson (1985)
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (1986)
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (1987)
The Uplift War by David Brin (1988)
Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh (1989)
Hyperion by Dan Simmons (1990)
The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold (1991)
Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold (1992)
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge (co-winner, 1993)
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (co-winner, 1993)
Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1994)
Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold (1995)
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1996)
Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (1997)
Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman (1998)
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis (1999)
A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge (2000)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling (2001)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (2002)
Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer (2003)
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold (2004)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2005)
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (2006)
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007)
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (2008)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (2009)
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (co-winner, 2010)
The City & the City by China Miéville (co-winner, 2010)

My favourites (at least, those I’ve given five stars on LibraryThing) in no particular order are Barrayar, Mirror Dance, Gateway, Green Mars, Blue Mars, Lord of Light, Doomsday Book, The Dispossessed, Rendezvous With Rama, Hyperion, A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Left Hand of Darkness and Fahrenheit 451. If I had to pick one out of those as my all-time favourite Hugo winner, I think it would be A Canticle for Leibowitz.

My least favourite – those I’ve given fewer than three stars to on Librarything – are Neuromancer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Cyteen, The Gods Themselves, The Uplift War, Downbelow Station, Hominids, and They’d Rather Be Right/The Forever Machine. I know that my failure to grok Cherryh or Gibson is not widely shared, but I think that the Farmer, the Asimov, the Sawyer and the Brin are genuinely awful books which should not have won in normal circumstances.

Right, Nebula winners next – I have read all but one (Powers) but there are another nine I haven’t written up on-line (Man Plus, Timescape, Falling Free, Tehanu, Slow River, The Moon and the Sun, Parable of the Talents, The Quantum Rose and The Speed of Dark).

I actually rather like To Say Nothing of the Dog. I have found Willis’ recent work cloying, tedious, and not as funny as many readers seem to think it is, and the reviews I’ve seen of Blackout/All Clear make me feel that, when it inevitably makes this year’s Hugo shortlist, it may well be the first shortlisted work I skip in over a decade. But rereading To Say Nothing of the Dog has reminded me that there was a time when her writing did not seem so laboured and her humour much more successful.

The story of To Say Nothing of the Dog concerns time-travelling historians who have been commissioned to retrieve an ornamental flower vase from Coventry Cathedral before its destruction in 1940. The humour revolves around failures of communication, references to various light literature (Three Men in a Boat, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers), tyrannical mother figures, and culture shock regarding the Victorian era (for some reason the key to rescuing the vase is in 1888). The various time travel paradoxes are rather reminiscent of the end of last year’s season of Doctor Who, but actually slightly more satisfactory in the way they are worked out. It’s not deep or tragic in the same way as Willis’ previous novel in this series, Doomsday Book, but it is rather good fun.

This won the Hugo for Best Novel back in 1999, beating Mary Doria Russell’s Children of God, Robert Charles Wilson’s Darwinia, Bruce Sterling’s Distraction and Robert J. Sawyer’s Factoring Humanity. This is the most recent year for which I have not read all the Hugo novel nominees; I was very disappointed with Children of God, which I felt a poor follow-up to The Sparrow. I have read Distraction but don’t remember much about it. The Nebula that year went to Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler which is a truly great book.

broadcast anniversaries

7 April 1973: broadcast of first episode of Planet of the Daleks. Jo and the Doctor land on Spiridon and separately encounter a Thal expedition.

7 April 2007: broadcast of The Shakespeare Code. The Doctor and Martha, visiting 1599 London, foil a plot by the Carrionites to invade the Earth via Shakespeare’s plays.

i) births and deaths

6 April 1959: birth of Mark Strickson, who played the Fifth Doctor companion Turlough in 1983-4.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

6 April 1968: broadcast of fourth episode of Fury from the Deep. Van Lutyens, and then the Doctor and Jamie, descend to the base of the impeller shaft and find the Weed Creature gathering in strength.

6 April 1974: broadcast of third episode of The Monster of Peladon. Sarah raises Queen Thalira’s consciousness, and the Ice Warriors arrive.

Librarything says I own and/or have read ten or more books by these authors:

Terrance Dicks (83)
Roger Zelazny (63)
William Shakespeare (46)
Terry Pratchett (43)
Nicholas Briggs (35)
Justin Richards (35)
Brian Aldiss (33)
Neil Gaiman (29)
Ian Rankin (27)
Paul Magrs (24)
Lois McMaster Bujold (22)
Marc Platt (21)
Dr. Seuss (21)
J.R.R. Tolkien (21)
Steve Lyons (20)
Jacqueline Rayner (20)
BBC (19)
Eddie Robson (19)
Jonathan Morris (18)
Paul Cornell (17)
Ursula K. Le Guin (17)
Arthur Charles Clarke (16)
Roald Dahl (16)
Lance Parkin (16)
Gary Russell (16)
Robert Silverberg (16)
Stephen Cole (15)
Simon Guerrier (15)
Bill Willingham (15)
Alan Barnes (14)
Lindsey Davis (14)
David G. Hartwell (14)
Ian McDonald (14)
David A. McIntee (14)
Sheri S. Tepper (14)
Isaac Asimov (13)
Ken MacLeod (13)
Gareth Roberts (13)
Trevor Baxendale (12)
David Bishop (12)
Enid Blyton (12)
Gardner Dozois (12)
Charles Stross (12)
Christopher Bulis (11)
J. K. Rowling (11)
Dave Stone (11)
Iain M. Banks (10)
Colin Brake (10)
Arthur Conan Doyle (10)
Herge (10)
Fritz Leiber (10)
Joseph Lidster (10)
Ian Marter (10)
Lawrence Miles (10)
Kate Orman (10)
Dav Pilkey (10)
Neal Stephenson (10)
Joanna Trollope (10)
Mike Tucker (10)

Many, but not all, of these are Doctor Who writers.

(Including for these purposes the BBC.)

A decent little book on the origins of the alphabet, the first half being about the global question of how the Latin script developed from hieroglyphics via cuneiform, Phoenician, Greek and etruscan, and the second half taking each letter individually. I’ve read several books on this topic so not much was new to me; the information is very much presented for the non-specialist, and readers may well wonder what the sounds were precisely that were represented by the Semitic letters aleph and ayin ( and ); Davies makes no attempt to bring in the details of phonetics. It’s also a bit of a shame that he misses out any discussion of the lost letters of the English alphabet – he does at least meantion yogh and wynn (ȝ and ƿ) but not thorn or edh (þ or ð), which is an educationaal opportunity missed – or of any other Latin-based languages. One would get the impression from the book that the English version of the Latin alphabet is the only one currently in use.

Not Three Mile Island but Chalk River in Canada; a fascinating historical note from the Economist:

Three weeks after Japan’s earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, spewing radiation as far as Iceland, clean-up crews have been working around the clock to bring the reactor under control and contain the leakage. Their life is a nightmare…

The fear and danger is beyond comprehension for most people, and in particular the political leaders who must order men in to danger. But interestingly, it is not unfamiliar to former American president Jimmy Carter. Nearly half a century ago, as a young naval officer, he led a 23-man team to dismantle a reactor that, like Fukushima, had partially melted down…

“The radiation intensity meant that each person could spend only about ninety seconds at the hot core location,” wrote Mr Carter in “Why Not the Best?”, an autobiography published in 1975 when he was campaigning for the presidency.

I may try and get hold of that book. I see it’s going for $0.01 second-hand.

i) births and deaths

5 April 1946: birth of Jane Asher, who played Susan Foreman in Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? (1994) and Andrea Yates in Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? (2007), and has thus played alternative

5 April 1991: death of Gerald Blake, who directed The Abominable Snowmen (1967) and The Invasion of Time (1978).

5 April 1999: death of John Wiles, innovative producer who succeeded Verity Lambert but did not last long in 1965-66.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

5 April 1969: broadcast of fifth episode of The Space Pirates. The Doctor and friends find they have been imprisoned with the terrified Dom Issigri; Clancey and Dom escape, but the Doctor, looking for Jamie and Zoe, is caught in the take-off blast.

5 April 1975: broadcast of fifth episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Doctor almost gets Davros to destroy the Daleks; Gharman leads a revolt against Davros; the Doctor prepares to blow up the incubation tanks.

5 April 2002: webcast of “No Child of Earth”, part 2, the sixth episode of Death Comes to Time.

5 April 2008: broadcast of Partners in Crime, first episode of Season Four of New Who; first regular appearance of Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. The Doctor and Donna foil a plan to turn large numbers of people into food for the infant Adipose.

The other of the two Torchwood audiobooks released last month, written by the reliable James Goss and read by the excellent Kai Owen. It’s a decent enough urban fantasy/horror tale, set in what is effectively a haunted department store, featuring also a rival capitalist version of Torchwood called Firestone. I was not as blown away by it as I was by the companion story Ghost Train, but it’s an honourable addition to the Torchwood range.

i) broadcast anniversaries

4 April 1964: broadcast of “Assassin at Peking”, seventh episode of the story we now call Marco Polo. The Khan wins the Tardis from the Doctor at backgammon, but releases the Tardis crew and allows Marco Polo to return to Venice when they prevent Tegana’s assassination attempt.

4 April 1970: broadcast of third episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor and Liz realise that the astronauts are absorbing so much radiation that they must be aliens; but Carrington’s men are in pursuit.

4 April 2008: broadcast of Exit Wounds, last episode of the second season of Torchwoodii) date specified in canon

4 April ?2010: setting of Planet of the Dead (2009).

This is the collected Fifth Doctor comic strips from Doctor Who Monthly #61-87, all written by Steve Parkhouse and with the best art done by Dave Gibbons (Mick Austin and Steve Dillon also contributing). It’s a very impressive effort – Big Finish fans will have heard Peter Davison a year or so ago admit that he had had no idea these existed, and then more recently saying how much he had enjoyed them once he finally got hold of them. What DWM and Parkhouse managed to do here was to establish a completely different Fifth Doctor continuity, where he has two spiritual bases – the quaint late twentieth-century English village of Stockbridge, and a high-tech, sinister, somewhat mystical Gallifrey – and has adventures being dragged between the two, and to other places. I remember now thinking at the time that one of the disappointments of Arc of Infinity was that the TV Gallifrey was so much less awe-inspiring than the Gallifrey that Parkhouse and Gibbons had summoned into being in the pages of the magazine. The whole sequence of stories has more unity of style and spirit than the TV series was managing at this point, and is all the better for it; and I may now go back and listen again to the recent Big Finish stories set in Stockbridge with the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa (which were all rather good – the “Autumn” segment of Circular Time, and the Castle of Fear / The Eternal Summer / Plague of the Daleks sequence).

In a later story here we also have the Meddling Monk returning, in alliance with the Ice Warriors, not so different from his alliance with the Daleks in the recent Big Finish audios (though obviously played by Peter Butterworth rather than Graeme Garden). Otherwise the Fifth Doctor has various male hangers-on – two warriors of different time periods (Sir Justin and Angus Goodman), übergeek Maxwell Edison, and the sinister Time Lord construct Shayde, with brief appearances from the mysterious psycho-military group SAG 3; almost no female characters at all here. (Someone who looks a bit like Zoe makes an appearance but doesn’t speak.)

NB also a short sequence at the end featuring the Fourth Doctor regressing to the First Doctor, originally published in 1980 in Doctor Who Weekly #17-18, presumably having escaped from the earlier collected volumes, and also rather good.

i) births and deaths

3 April 1924: birth of Peter Hawkins, the original voice of the Daleks and Cybermen.

3 April 1929: birth of Michael Hayes, who directed The Androids of Tara (1978), The Armageddon Factor (1979), and City of Death (1979).

3 April 2008: death of Johnny Byrne, who wrote The Keeper of Traken (1981), Arc of Infinity (1983), and Warriors of the Deep (1984).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 April 1965: broadcast of “The Knight of Jaffa”, second episode of the story we now call The Crusade. King Richard asks the Doctor and Vicki to join his court, and sends Ian to rescue Barbara, who meantime has been handed over to the evil El Akir.

3 April 1971: broadcast of fourth episode of The Claws of Axos. The Doctor sends Axos – and the Master? – into a perpetual timeloop, but is himself unable to leave Earth.

3 April 2010: broadcast of The Eleventh Hour, first story in Season Five of New Who; first full episode for Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, first appearances of Karen Gillan as Amy Pond and Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams.

I can’t quite believe that I managed to reach the age of nearly 44 without having read this brilliant children’s fantasy, though I had fond if vague memories of Dorothea Brooking’s 1974 BBC adaptation. Tom, sent to stay with his aunt and uncle after his brother develops measles, discovers that when the clock in the hall strikes thirteen in the middle of the night he is able to visit the garden as it was in the past, and makes friends with Hattie who lives in that past time, though they argue about which of them is a ghost. For the adult reader the story is actually Hattie’s, Tom being the not completely reliable viewpoint character, and the ending, which I remembered as cutely satisfying when I watched it on TV aged seven, carries a stupendous emotional punch now that I am old enough to really appreciate it. A fantastic book; read it with your children, or borrow someone else’s to read it with.

I had previously read the first volume of Cyril Falls’ Military Operations Macedonia, with its forensic and detailed account of every action fought by British troops in the Macedonia campaign of the First World War (the Great War, as he thought of it in 1933), in which my grandfather was involved. I turned to this book also for family history reasons, though concerning a much more distant ancestor, and expected it to be a similarly detailed and map-heavy account of the major engagements of the period – Kinsale, the Battle of the Yellow Ford, the Battle of the Biscuits, etc; I was braced for detail but not a lot of enlightenment.

But it is far far better than I expected. I should have realised that since the detailed records are not there in the same way as they were for the First World War, Falls would have to take a different approach, and so indeed he does. The book starts with an account of how government functioned in Ireland, including the most lucid explanation of the roled of the Lord Deputy/Lord Lieitenant/Lords Justices and the Irish Council that I have read. He goes on to examine the weaknesses of the systems of recruitment/conscription and supply for the English (and Irish) military forces. From a slightly different perspective to Haigh, he explores Elizabeth’s relative lack of control over military matters. He also looks at Essex’s failures rather more sympathetically than I would (or the Queen did).

The extent to which violence, including the slaughter of captured enemy forces (600, including 400 civilians, killed by Sir Francis Drake on Rathlin Island in 1575; another 600 captured at Smerwick in 1580; hundreds, maybe even a couple of thousand, Spanish sailors shipwrecked after the failure of the Armada in 1588) was taken as a normal state of affairs is sadly reminiscent of many much more recent conflicts. Indeed, I found a lot of resonances between the Nine Years’ War and the Sudanese conflict – the cattle-centred agricultural economy, the attempts by government forces to split the opposition and fight on the ground through local proxies (Falls displays outrage at the extent to which the English were prepared to abandon former Irish allies when they had outlived their usefulness), the religious dimension which led the rebels to appeal to fellow-believers outside the country; there is the obvious difference that John Garang was more intelligent, more determined and more ruthless than Hugh O’Neill, with the result that he managed to deliver independence for his people, though he did not live to see it.

Sir Nicholas White isn’t mentioned explicitly in the text, but again I found Falls’ contextualisation of two incidents in which he was involved, the peculiarly named cess controversy of 1577 and the 1580 expedition to Dingle and points west, very enlightening and helpful. Even more useful, from my own point of view, was Falls’ account of the career of the Earl of Ormonde, who was White’s patron in the early days and who was himself the most senior (and successful) Irish-born military commander on Elizabeth’s side, as well as being the largest landowner in Ireland and the man who would have run the country if the earlier Tudor policy of appointing locals rather than English officials to run the executive arm had been maintained. In the administrative records he is more of a shadowy figure, I guess because having his own local base he had less to prove in Dublin Castle.

Anyway, an excellent read and an unexpected pleasure.

i) births and deaths

2 April 1934: birth of the great Robert Holmes, script editor from Robot (1974-75) to Image of the Fendahl (1977), and author of The Krotons (1968-69), The Space Pirates (1969), Spearhead from Space (1970), Terror of the Autons (1971), Carnival of Monsters (1973), The Time Warrior (1973-74), The Ark in Space (1975), Pyramids of Mars (1975), The Brain of Morbius (co-author, 1976), The Deadly Assassin (1976), The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Sun Makers (1977), The Ribos Operation (1978), The Power of Kroll (1978-79), The Caves of Androzani (1984), The Two Doctors (1985), The Mysterious Planet (1986), and the first episode of The Ultimate Foe (1986).

2 April 1940: birth of Peter Haining, who wrote reference books Doctor Who: A Celebration (1983), The Key to Time (1984), The Doctor Who File (1986), The Time-Travellers’ Guide (1987) and Doctor Who: 25 Glorious Years (1988)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

2 April 1966: broadcast of “The Celestial Toyroom”, first episode of the story we now call The Celestial Toymaker. The (invisible) Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive in the realm of the sinister Toymaker, who forces them to play a deadly form of Blind Man’s Bluff.

2 April 1977: broadcast of sixth episode of The Talons of Weng-Chiang, ending Season 14. The Doctor and Leela, with allies Jago and Litefoot, destroy Weng-Chiang and Mr Sin in a massive fire-fight in the laundry.

2 April 2005: broadcast of The End of the World. The Doctor and Rose arrive on Platform One to watch the Sun expanding to destroy the Earth, and are embroiled in a murder plot.

2 April 2007: broadcast of first show of Totally Doctor Who including first epsiode of The Infinite Quest.