i) broadcast anniversaries

7 June 1969: broadcast of eighth episode of The War Games. The War Chief offers a deal to the Doctor, who allows the War Lords to capture the rebels.

7 June 2008: broadcast of Forest of the Dead. The Doctor defeats the Vashta Nerada, but at the cost of the lives of River Song and her team, who however are preserved within the Library.

ii) date specified in canon

7 June 1941: setting of earlier parts of Lost in Time (SJA, 2010).

broadcast anniversaries

6 June 1965: broadcast of “The Bride of Sacrifice”, third episode of the story we now call The Aztecs. The Doctor gets engaged to Cameca.

6 June 1970: broadcast of fifth episode of Inferno. Now that the parallel Earth’s crust has been penetrated, earthquakes are felt everywhere, and the Primords mass to attack.

6 June 2003: webcast of sixth episode of Shada. The Doctor and Romana defeat Skagra, and Romana pardons Professor Chronotis/Salyavin.

A mercifully shorter chapter at 44 pages, compared to the epic length of some recent ones, very largely drawn from the works of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, and describing in detail the functioning of the court and culture of the Byzantine empire of the ninth century.

It may have escaped your notice (it almost escaped mine), but there is a by-election in West Belfast on Thursday, due to Gerry Adams having left to represent County Louth in the Dáil.

The last time Sinn Féin got less than 50% of the vote here was in 1992, and the last time they got less than 60% of the vote here was in 1998. The result is therefore not in serious doubt. The candidates, and the votes each of their parties got in last month’s Assembly election and last year’s Westminster election, are as follows:

I am guessing that the votes will be counted during the day on Friday.

Again, thanks to the Hugo shortlist I have tried one of the great graphic novel writers for the first time, and while I was not as blown away by this as I was by the first two volumes of Mike Carey’s The Unwritten, I am realising that I should look out for more Talbot. Grandville Mon Amour is set in an alternate London and Paris, where all characters (apart from a couple of human muggers) are anthropomorphised animals: Inspector LeBrock, the central figure, has the head of a badger. England has recently regained independence and declared itself a socialist republic after a bloody occupation by France, and LeBrock finds himself investigating an escaped prisoner and a series of murders which take him to a top-level political conspiracy. To be honest the plot was not terribly surprising, and (unlike Spiegelmann’s Maus) we never get a good handle on why some people are badgers, others dogs and others again hippopotami, but the loving and colourful detail of the story’s bizarre background, combining familiar landmarks with inhuman faces and steampunk technology, is pretty memorable.

One of the first run of Torchwood novels, which I am just now getting into (just in time for Miracle Day). A fairly standard monster-of-the-week story, the monster in this case being an alien which poses as a lake creature and infects male humans with its offspring. I felt the writing style was a bit clunky at first but it seemed to get tightened up as we went on. The front cover and spine feature Burn Gorman as Owen, and he does get more exposure than the other four, but we get a fair bit of Jack and Toshiko as well. Will be looking out for more of these.

i) births and deaths

5 June 1908: birth of Bill Fraser, who played General Grugger in Meglos (1980) and Bill Pollock in K9 and Company (1981).

5 June 1919: birth of Lawrence Payne, who played Johnny Ringo in The Gunfighters (1966), Morix in The Leisure Hive (1980), and Dastari in The Two Doctors (1985).

5 June 1917: birth of Anne Tirard, who played Locusta in The Romans (1965) and the Seeker in The Ribos Operation (1978).

5 June 1921: birth of Bill Sellars, who directed The Celestial Toymaker (1966).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

5 June 1966: broadcast of “Flight Through Eternity”, third episode of the story we now call The Chase. First appearance of Peter Purves, though not as Steven Taylor. The Tardis, pursued by the Daleks, lands on the Empire State Building and the Mary celeste.

5 June 1971: broadcast of third episode of The Dæmons. The Doctor and the Brigadier try to penetrate the heat shield around the village.

5 June 2010: broadcast of Vincent and the Doctor. The Doctor investigates a mysterious creature in one of van Gogh’s paintings and gets entangled with the Krafayis.

date specified in canon

5 June 1994: birth of Clyde Langer (as in the Sarah Jane Adventures).

Really not difficult for me to rank these.

5) Blackout / All Clear, by Connie Willis. I have only read half of this but I find it hard to imagine that the second half will lift it off the end of my ballot – too padded and just not really very interesting. Alas, it will probably win the Hugo as it already (and inexplicably) has the Nebula.

4) The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin. I note that I said I enjoyed this a lot when I read it over a year ago, and it has been widely praised. But I find I now cannot remember much about it, which is no doubt more my fault than the author’s, but means I can’t really give it a high vote.

3) Feed, by ‘Mira Grant’. A good book about the zombie apocalypse which slightly disappointed in that I hoped the plot would turn out more complex than it did.

2) Cryoburn, by Lois McMaster Bujold. Unlike the Connie Willis book, which retreads her old themes and characters at much greater length but to no greater effect, Bujold has taken her characters to new territory here, both in terms of planetary setting and in terms of emotional maturity. It’s not the greatest of the Vorkosigan books but it is a welcome return to form after the wobble of Diplomatic Immunity.

1) The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald. I really think this is Ian McDonald’s best book yet, his trademark lush prose intersecting with near-future nanoterrorism and much older mysteries in a richly imagined Istanbul. I know that I am probably biased by affinity with both the author and the setting, but I don’t have much hesitation in giving it my top spot.

Previous Hugo category write-ups: Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form, Best Dramatic Presentation – Short Form.

Having raved about the first volume of this series yesterday, I am equally glad about the second volume today, a collection of seven issues (I think), the first four taking Tom Taylor to a French prison where the governor reads Tommy Taylor books to his children and the Song of Roland makes an appearance, the next two taking Tom and his allies Savoy and Lizzie Hexen to Stuttgart in 1940 and a confrontation with Goebbels over the film of Jud Süss, and the last being a horrifying side story of a thug trapped in the form of a fluffy bunny rabbit in a children’s book. The title of this volume at first appears to refer to a blog kept by one of Tom Taylor’s fellow prisoners, but expands in meaning to ask what is inside any of us.

The Stuttgart section has bravely included several quotations from Hitler in the original German, without translation. My German is good enough to get the meaning (and spot a few transcription errors) but I wonder how this will go down with the average reader?

But basically I liked it a lot, and unless Bryan Talbot surprises me it will get my Hugo vote.

• LRB · Ross McKibbin · Can Clegg be forgiven?
  The first anniversary of the coalition government has been and gone, and – like its members, no doubt – we have no clear idea of what its future will be. The various elections that accompanied the anniversary didn’t help. By general consent the Lib Dems had most to worry about after . . .
  (tags: ukpolitics)

First half of the two-volume novel which won the Nebula last month and has been nominated for the Hugo. We are back in the time travel world of Fire Watch, Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, where near-future historians at Oxford send graduate students back to key points of British history (though their research methodology is never adequately explained).

The portrayal of wartime Britain is relentless and in the end wearyingly sentimentalised, the history students too busy being caught up in the moment to reflect on what they are doing there and what they might learn. There is an awful lot of running around and missed communication, and then the book ends in mid-story, without even the dignity of a decent cliffhanger, the publisher expecting you to buy the next volume to see how it ends. I will, but will wait until it is available as a second-hand paperback.

I was interested to note however that some of the errors of detail mercilessly catalogued by here and here seem to have been fixed – in particular, I was looking out for references to the Victoria and Jubilee lines and didn't spot either. The version I have is the free ebook supplied to Hugo voters, so perhaps it has been revised in the year or so since his notes.

Of the time travel stories, this doesn't annoy me as much as Fire Watch, whose errors of setting make it almost unreadable for me, but it is much less enjoyable than To Say Nothing of the Dog and a far less good novel (at least so far) than Doomsday Book. I shall do a post ranking the Hugo nominated novels tomorrow but you can safely assume that this will not be top of my list.

I just realised, thanks to the wonders of Facebook, that both my oldest first cousin and my youngest first cousin have birthdays today. The one is about 40 and the other about 20. My mother is the oldest of nine children, and I am the oldest of my grandfather’s grandchildren (he was married twice). Altogether there are 22 of us, with I think about 17 in the next generation so far (my own three children, my two nieces, and a dozen offspring of our other cousins). I don’t think we have ever all been in the same place at the same time, and there’s at least one I haven’t seen in twenty-five years.

My father, on the other hand, had only one sister who had no children. Funny how families vary.

Volume 2 of this series has been nominated for the Hugo this year, but I though I should start at the beginning; I must say if Volume 2 is half as good as this it will probably be getting my vote. Four of the five issues compiled here are the story of Tommy Taylor, son of the vanished writer Wilson Taylor who has immortalised him as the hero of a series of Harry Potter-like books; a series of revelations leads to a confrontation at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, interrogating the boundaries between genres and between literature and real life. I thought it was witty and horrific, and really enjoyed it. The fifth issue is a secret history of Rudyard Kipling’s life as an unwilling tool of the secret masters of world literature. I hadn’t read anything by Mike Carey before, as far as I remember, and I’ve obviously been missing out.

Nineteen adventures into the Eighth Doctor series, and he finally gets a new companion in the shape of Fitz Kreiner (I have seen a claim somewhere that there are more stories with Fitz than for any other companion), picked up on a visit to 1963 in which his mother is killed by the gruesomely horrible Taine, leech-like internal parasites feeding on brainwaves. The writing is decent enough; I was a bit startled by Fitz’s unreconstructed early Sixties predatory masculinity directed to Sam, having only read later stories in the range; presumably he mellows out in the course of the series.

It must be around thirty years since I read this book, which came towards the end of Dickens’ career (followed only by Our Mutual Friend and Edwin Drood). For today’s reader, the portrayal of the poor as either comic or villainous grates somewhat, redeemed a bit by Magwitch’s personal history when we eventually find out about it; and few of the middle-class characters are very nice people either (particularly the women). It seems a somehow mean-spirited book, holding a slightly distorting mirror up to society without really digging into the wider causes of human misery. Wikipedia has the original ending, where it is clear that Pip has lost Estrella for ever, and that seems actually a rather more appropriate send-off than the revised version’s reunion.

i) births and deaths

4 June 1927: birth of Geoffrey Palmer, who played Masters in Doctor Who and the Silurians (1970), the Administrator in The Mutants (1972), and Hardaker in Voyage of the Damned (2007). His son Charles Palmer directed four episodes of Doctor Who in 2007.

4 June 1933: birth of Ric Felgate, who played Roy Stone in The War Machines (1966), Brent in The Seeds of Death (1969), and Charles Van Lyden in The Ambassadors of Death (1970).

4 June 1940: birth of David Collings, who played Vorus in Revenge of the Cybermen (1975), Poul in The Robots of Death (1978), and Mawdryn in Mawdryn Undead (1983). He also played an alternate Doctor in the 2003 Big Finish audio Full Fathom Five, by Gary Russell.

4 June 1969: birth of Julie Gardner, Executive Producer of New Who from 2005 to 2008.

4 June 1980: birth of Philip Olivier, who plays the Seventh Doctor’s companion Hex in Big Finish audios.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

4 June 1966: broadcast of second episode of The Savages. The Doctor works out what the Elders have been doing, but his life energy is drained by Jano.

4 June 2005: broadcast of Boom Town. The Doctor and Rose discover that a Slitheen is mayor of Cardiff and has sinister plans for the Blaidd Drwg nuclear power station.

4 June 2011: broadcast of A Good Man Goes To War.

iii) date specified in canon

4 June 1926: The crew of the SS Bernice vanishes from the Indian Ocean, becoming an exhibit in Vorg’s Miniscope, as seen in Carnival of Monsters (1973).

• Humanitarianism in Crisis | United States Institute of Peace
  Money quote: "Without a vigorous restatement of the principles of humanitarianism, humanitarian action will remain in a state of crisis and continue to be a selective tool for the powerful and hence fail in its global mission of protecting and restoring the dignity of human life."
  (tags: war politics)

i) births and deaths

3 June 1927: birth of Kit Pedler, who co-wrote The Tenth Planet (1966), The Moonbase (1967) and The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967).

3 June 1946: birth of Penelope Wilton, who played Prime Minister Harriet Jones in several stories between 2005 and 2008.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 June 1967: broadcast of third episode of Evil of the Daleks. The Doctor agrees to test Jamie in order to isolate the ‘huma factor’.

3 June 1971: broadcast of third episode of The Time Monster. The Master, having summoned Krasis via the time crystal, launches a series of time-crossing attacks on UNIT.

3 June 2006: broadcast of The Impossible Planet. The Doctor and Rose arrive on a base investigating a mysterious world impossibly in orbit around a black hole, where the human staff are assisted by the enigmatic Ood.

We went to the nearby town of Sint-Truiden today, it being a public holiday and the place looking at least vaguely interesting. It is blessed with decently preserved architecture, witness here the town hall and church in the main square:

and here a sculpture dedicated to the area’s main agricultural produce, yer basic fruits:

(You will note Mrs making a rare appearance.)

Some interesting art also in the main square:

Rather gloriously, the tourist agency has put together a Quest for younger visitors, consisting of nine little locked boxes at several of the monuments. You are given a key, and some mildly cryptic clues, and you follow the map and take a puzzle piece out of each box:

You may find yourself distracted en route by unexpected medieval frescos…

…the elaborate astronomical clock of Camille Festraets, including wondrous animated figures which emerge and perform on the hour…

…or even cute baby goats…

…but eventually you will assemble the pieces to form a picture which says, can you see a gate like this?

If you can see such a gate, go through it…

…and you will find the treasure chest in an alcove…

..full of souvenir medals of St Trudo, the patron saint of Sint-Truiden.

Quite a long walk in the end, but a good time was had by all.

Making a start on the nominated works in this year’s Best Graphic Story category of the Hugo Awards. As before, I think there is a valid question of eligibility given that the actual “Witches” storyline is bookended by two other stories between the same covers, and that it’s not really completely resolved; but I think this is a case where the Hugo rules don’t completely match the reality of how graphic stories are published or read.

The central story of Witches has the rise of Baba Yaga as an enemy of the Fables, courageously opposed by the winged monkey Bufkin and his allies; and also a parallel story line of shifts of power among the Fables who are now at their farm, exiled from New York. The former worked better for me, the latter still needing resolution in a future volume.

The first pages of the book, however, are a rather effective vignette of a group we have not encountered before called the Boxers – a fighting order who trap their enemies in large magical boxes; it’s Willingham’s riff on any number of young warrior stories, but done rather well. And the last pages take us back to the former Frog Prince’s new kingdom of Haven, with a parable about peacebuilding in a post-conflict society; I’m sufficiently familiar with these issues from my work that I found it a little didactic, but perhaps that won’t be the general reaction, and some of the character moments were rather memorable.

i) births and deaths

2 June 1922: birth of Carmen Silvera, who played several parts in The Celestial Toymaker (1966) and also Ruth in Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974), better known in later years as René Artois’s long-suffering wife Edith in ‘Allo! ‘Allo!.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

2 June 1973: broadcast of third episode of The Green Death. The Doctor and Jo escape from the mine, but the egg they bring back hatches and a maggot threatens Jo.

2 June 1997: publication of The Eight Doctors, by Terrance Dicks, and The Devil Goblins from Neptune, by Martin Day and Keith Topping, launching the Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor adventures respectively.

2 June 2007: broadcast of The Family of Blood. The Doctor sheds his human self and tricks the Family into submission.

iii) date specified in canon

2 June 1866: setting of the Victorian parts of Evil of the Daleks (1967).

2 June 1953: Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, as seen in The Idiot’s Lantern (2006).

Fewer than usual this month due to illness, watching Hugo-nominated films, watching longer-than-usual episodes of Old Who and reading Hugo-nominated short fiction.

Non-fiction 4 (YTD 27)
The Alexiad, by Anna Comnena
Age of Atrocity, edited by David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait
The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain
Who On Earth Is Tom Baker? An Autobiography

Fiction (non-SF) 2 (YTD 21)
The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Sophie's World, by Jostein Gaarder

SF (non-Who) 4 (YTD 29)
Speaking in Tongues, by Ian McDonald
The Shaping of Middle-Earth, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lifecycle of Software Objects, by Ted Chiang
Feed, by Mira Grant

Doctor Who, Torchwood, Sarah Jane, K9 2 (YTD 33)
The Dimension Riders, by Daniel Blythe
Doctor Who Annual 1984

Comics 2 (YTD 8)
Ōoku: The Inner Chambers vol. 4, by Fumi Yoshinaga
Fables vol. 13: The Great Fables Crossover, by Bill Willingham and Matthew Sturges

~4,500 pages (YTD ~33,300)
5/14 (YTD 19/118) by women (Comnena, Tait, Lahiri, Grant, Yoshinaga)
3/14 (YTD 9/118) by PoC (Lahiri, Chiang, Yoshinaga)
Owned for more than a year: 4 (The Alexiad [reread], Speaking in Tongues [reread], Dimension Riders, Sophie's World)
Also reread: None (YTD 18/118)

Programmed reads: 9 from 10 lists
b) The Innocents Abroad (non-fiction by popularity on LT)
e) and f) Sophie's World (non-genre fiction by popularity on LT and on LJ poll)
g) Speaking in Tongues (sf anthologies in order of entry)
l) Dimension Riders (New Adventures in sequence)
o) Who On Earth Is Tom Baker? (other Old Who by popularity)
p) The Shaping of Middle-Earth (History of Middle Earth in sequence)
r) Age of Atrocity (Tudors and Ireland)
s) The Namesake (books by PoC in order of entry)
t) The Alexiad (books on the shelves at end 2005, otherwise not accounted for, going backwards in LT entry order)

Coming next, possibly:
The Taint by Michael Collier (started)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (started)
Fables vol. 14: Witches by Bill Willingham (started)
Blackout by Connie Willis (started)
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
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
Something In The Water by Trevor Baxendale
Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds
Irish Magic II edited by Morgan Llywelyn
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish by Neil Gaiman
Spenser's The Faerie Queen – A Selection of Critical Essays edited by Peter C. Bayley
The Lost Road and Other Writings by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
The Left-handed Hummingbird by Kate Orman
Terre Des Hommes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
State of Change by Christopher Bulis

i) births and deaths

1 June 1947: birth of Jonathan Pryce, who played the Master in The Curse of Fatal Death (1999).

1 June 1991: death of Milton Subotsky, who produced and wrote Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966), the two cinema films starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who.

1 June 2005: death of Geoffey Toone, who played Temmosus in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Hepesh in The Curse of Peladon (1972).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

1 June 1968: broadcast of sixth episode of The Wheel In Space, ending Season 4 of Old Who. The Doctor manages to destroy the Cybermen with the X-ray laser; and Zoe stows away on the Tardis.

1 June 1974: broadcast of fifth part of Planet of the Spiders. The Doctor confronts the Great One, and escapes to Earth with Sarah; but she is under the spiders’ control.

iii) date specified in canon

1 June 1977: Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, as celebrated in Mawdryn Undead (1983).

i) births and deaths

31 May 1983: birth of Reggie Yates who played Martha’s brother Leo in the 2007 series of Doctor Who.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

31 May 1969: broadcast of seventh episode of The War Games. The Doctor and friends start a rebellion, capturing the 1917 chateau from General Smythe.

31 May 2008: broadcast of Silence in the Library