• Coolest Shakespeare Riffs in Science Fiction and Fantasy
  I have a feeling that I did some of this research myself a while back, but it's a good list.
  (tags: shakespeare sf)

I was invited to a reception last night at the Northern Ireland Executive’s representative office in Brussels, theoretically to mark its official opening (though in fact they moved to that address a year ago, and I myself organised an event in their premises in September). There were about 200 people there, including my good friend Stephen Farry, who had come over specially for the event as a member of the committee which scrutinises the First Minister and Deputy First Minister; I spent most of the evening talking to him. Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness made introductory speeches, and then José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission, announced that he was reviving a Northern Ireland-specific economic taskforce, in one of the better speeches I have heard from him, though he didn’t stick around afterwards.

Slightly to my surprise I recognised one tall bloke leaning against a pillar on his own as Tom Elliott, the new leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. I introduced myself, and he reminded me that we had corresponded about election results in Fermanagh many years ago (I had completely forgotten). I teased him about his decision to run three candidates in Upper Bann in next year’s elections, where by my count he will be fortunate to keep both seats; he explained the logic behind that decision – for which he took full responsibility – to me, and I can understand it even if I don’t agree with it. We also discussed another topic which I will cover in an unlocked post (this is locked to friends who I trust to be discreet). I came away slightly more impressed than I had expected to be; Elliott is I think too narrowly focussed on the internal dynamics of his own party, but he will develop them fairly well, and there is a good argument that to get a sustainable recovery if the political wind should ever start blowing in his favour again he will have to get the nots and bolts right first.

I then managed to catch Peter Robinson, who I have met a few times previously (most notably we were at a conference together in the Netherlands in 1994, and I later advised him informally about an early DUP website in 1996). He was looking pretty drained and complained that he had had two days of non-stop meetings in Brussels, with no break and still a formal dinner to endure. He also grumbled that Sinn Féin keep putting forward unreasonable proposals for new taxes; I was unaware that the Northern Ireland Assembly had the power to put a special tax on phone masts, but this obviously falls into the category of SF proposals that Robinson has described in public as “completely off the wall”.

Finally, with Stephen’s help, I managed to catch a few words with Martin McGuinness before he and Robinson were swept off for the official dinner. This was actually quite a big thing for me; when I was most active in the process, Sinn Féin was largely out of it, and when they were in I was too junior to attend meetings, so the only SF activist I know particularly well is their MEP Bairbre de Brún, and that is because she taught me French at school (she was “Miss Brown” then). (And there are a couple of others who I’ve had phone or email contact with.) Slightly to my surprise McGuinness immediately identified me as the person behind the elections website, and claimed to be “genuinely delighted” to have met me. Which I must say made me feel rather less like a politics fanboy trying to tick all the boxes of important Northern Irish figures who I have met. But maybe that’s what makes him a good politician.

If you comment on an entry here with a direct question for me about a completely different topic to that of the post you are commenting on, I am afraid you may not always receive a charitable response. My response is even less likely to be charitable if you are asking about a web page which contains i) a link to my email address, ii) an invitation to contact me by email (ie not via drive-by commenting) for further discussion, and iii) the actual answer, fairly clearly labelled, to the question you ask. My email address is not a secret.

i) births and deaths

10 December 1921: birth of Anthony Coburn, writer of the very first Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child (and also of the unbroadcast The Masters of Luxor).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

10 December 1966: broadcast of sixth episode of The Power of the Daleks. The Daleks start to take over but the Doctor manages to overload their circuits and destroy them.

10 December 1977: broadcast of third episode of The Sun Makers. Leela is captured and is to be executed by steaming (a particularly gruesome fate).

10 December 2006: broadcast of Random Shoes (Torchwood), the one with Eugene the dead guy and the alien eye.

iii) dates specified in canon

10 December 1981: Sarah Jane Smith fails to pick Brendan Richards up from school. (K9 and Company).

10 December 1983: Bernice Summerfield is reunited with her father. (In Kate Orman’s Return of the Living Dad, published 1996; there are a number of Orman novels with dates specified in December.)

9 December 1938: birth of Waris Hussein, director of An Unearthly Child (1963) and Marco Polo (1964).

9 December 1967: broadcast of fifth episode of The Ice Warriors. Clent prepares to use the ioniser; the Ice Warriors prepare to use their sonic cannon.

9 December 1978: broadcast of third episode of The Androids of Tara. The Doctor tries to rescue Romana, but it’s her android double; the real Romana escapes and is recaptured.

• Student visa reform proposed | Home Office
  "Contribute your views to our consultation into how we can best reduce the number of students who can come to the UK." An appalling pretence at public consultation with the most biased online survey I have ever seen.
  (tags: ukpolitics)

i) births and deaths

8 December 1939: birth of Jennie Linden, who played Barbara in Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

8 December 1979: broadcast of third episode of Nightmare of Eden. The Doctor realises that vraxoin comes from roast Mandrel.

8 December 2009: broadcast of second episode of Enemy of the Bane, concluding the second series of Sarah Jane Adventures. Sarah, Luke and the Brigadier force Mrs Wormwood and the Sontaran into a portal concealed in a stone circle.

iii) real event featured in Who f

8 December 1980: John Lennon is assassinated, despite the efforts of the Doctor and Ace in Kate Orman’s 1993 The Left-Handed Hummingbird.

Comments on my not totally effusive post on Good Omens have revealed that my tastes are not the same as everyone’s (I know, imagine my surprise, etc). There is of course only one possible way to establish definitively which are the best novels by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and that is to conduct a poll. So without further ado:

Feel free to justify your choice, or query others’, below.

• Our friends in the desert – TheHill.com
  "A less-than-accurate narrative is saleable as long as those to whom it is sold don’t discover that it is little more than fiction.

  Controlling the narrative becomes even more important when few Americans are familiar with the facts. "

  (tags: westernsahara)
• African poverty: Falling faster than you think | vox – Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
  Our main conclusion is that Africa is reducing poverty, and doing it much faster than many thought. * The growth from the period 1995-2006, far from benefiting only the elites, has been sufficiently widely spread that both total African inequality and African within-country inequality actually declined over this period. * The speed at which Africa has reduced poverty since 1995 puts it on track to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty relative to 1990 by 2015 on time or, at worst, a couple of years late. * If the Democratic Republic of Congo converges to the African trend once it is stabilised, the MDG will be achieved by 2012, three years before the target date.
  (tags: africa economics)
• Twenty-one Oxbridge colleges took no black students last year | Education | The Guardian
  "only one black Briton of Caribbean descent was accepted for undergraduate study at Oxford last year… One Oxford college, Merton, has admitted no black students in five years … at Newnham, an all-women's [Cambridge] college, … black applicants had a 13% success rate compared with 67% for white students"
  (tags: ukpolitics cambridge education)
• cassiphone: The Women of The Five Doctors
  "There is an emotional core utterly missing from The Five Doctors, only evident in tiny moments here and there, while the larger ones are wasted. I still enjoy it as a story, I always will – it’s a grand adventure and one of those Doctor Who stories that is burned on to my ten-year-old psyche – but for a show that was working so hard to define the mythology of Doctor Who, it missed the mark when it comes to defining and redefining the role of women in the show. By acknowledging the cliches about girl companions and not doing enough to counteract them or even comment on them (we needed more pineapple cocktail moments to balance out the tea-making!) it only serves to cement those cliches as being essential to the show’s history, rather than one of the least interesting aspects of it."
  (tags: doctorwho)
• Classic TV Press: The Pandorica Opens
  Guide to the Eleventh Doctor – so far
  (tags: doctorwho)
• Why WikiLeaks Is Bad for Scholars – The Chronicle Review
  I'm not sure that I really agree with Drezner. Many academic international relations specialists are far behind the reality of what is happening anyway. I hope Wikileaks may shake up the better ones and humble the worse ones. Sure, primary materials written now and made available in thirty years' time may become more guarded, but I am not convinced that they are being well used by scholars even now.
  (tags: wikileaks usa politics)

Although I’m a fan of both Pratchett and Gaiman, I don’t quite get Good Omens, which seems to me to have the two writers not so much reinforcing each others’ talents as toning them down. I did laugh out loud at the footnotes about firelighters and decimal currency, but I have to say that the book itself is rather a footnote in its authors’ careers as far as I’m concerned.

I picked up this book in a foul mood the other day and it cheered me up almost instantly. McCarthy looks at Hergé’s adventures of Tintin and finds all kinds of hidden material – tracking recurrent themes through the entire œuvre, including such issues as sepulchres, mirrors, castration, and the true and incredible meaning of the Castafiore Emerald.

I was particularly impressed, as I always am in books like this, by the relation made by McCarthy between Hergé’s work and his life. Remi (to use his real name) shifted uneasily from his pre-war racism and anti-Semitism to a more liberal approach, generated perhaps by the very fact of writing in Nazi-occupied Belgium – a passive collaboration which he never quite expiated. And his grandmother, working in an aristocratic household not far from my own home village, rather mysteriously conceived his father and uncle (who used to wander around as if they were twins) and then married Mr Remi whose name was borne by her sons and their descendants, leading to the sort of genealogical fuzziness that can give you two obviously identical twins called Thompson and Thomson. As to who Hergé’s real grandfather was, Belgian royalists can only speculate.

There were a couple of points that I did not really get in the course of McCarthy’s argument. Much is made of Barthes’ assessment of a short story by Balzac, ending in a ‘vanishing point’, holding ‘the signifier of the inexpressible’, a concept that didn’t really convey much meaning to me. And I would have liked to see also some wider discussion of the geopolitical setting of the post-1945 Tintin stories, considering that the global situation is so crucial in the earlier volumes.

But basically it’s a good painless introduction to literary theory by means of a well-known, well-loved canon; when McCarthy sneers in the introduction at ‘Buffy-the-Vampire-Slayer-as-Postmodern-Signifier conferences’, he is sneering also at himself I think (certainly it’s an unfortunate line which undermines his own argument).

NB the icon for this post is especially appropriate since I wrote most of it on the way home.

A Seventh Doctor / Ace novel set before Survival, thus outside the New Adventures continuity which I am used to. Despite the fact that Keith Topping is a co-author, I thought it was rather good, a sort-of sequel to The Awakening and to a lesser extent The Dæmons, with occult practices in a remote English village connecting both to ancient aliens and the highest levels of today’s government; lots of good moments for Ace and her Doctor, and managing to engage with the genre of The Wicker Man while still being more or less a Doctor Who story. Two things I didn’t like: the scene-setting seventeenth-century dialogue in the opening chapter is terrible (though oddly later chapters do it better) and there seemed to be a geographical delusion that Liverpool is the nearest large city to Wiltshire. But apart from that it worked for me.

i) births and deaths

7 December 1947: birth of Wendy Padbury, who played Second Doctor companion Zoe Heriot in 1968-69.

7 December 1998: death of Michael Craze, who played Ben Jackson, companion of the First and Second Doctors, in 1966-67.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

7 December 1963: broadcast of “The Forest of Fear”, third episode of the story we now call An Unearthly Child. The time travellers escape from the Cave of Skulls, but are recaptured just as they reach the Tardis.

7 December 1968: broadcast of sixth episode of The Invasion. UNIT rescues Watkins: the Cybermen and Vaughn broadcast their radio signal to Take Ovar Thee Wurld.

7 December 1987: broadcast of third episode of Dragonfire, concluding Season 24. Mel Bush’s last appearance. Kane tries to use the dragonfire crystal but is destroyed by sunlight.

7 December 1988: broadcast of third episode of Silver Nemesis. The Nemesis statue absorbs Lady Peinforte, and the Doctor uses it to destroy the Cyber fleet.

I don’t plan on spending any more nights away from home this year, so my list of places where I’ve spent midnight away from home in 2010 is as follows (non-consecutive stays in the same place marked with an asterisk, several overnight flights not tallied):

Nicosia, Cyprus
Juba, Southern Sudan*
Nairobi, Kenya*
Viana do Castelo, Portugal
Geneva, Switzerland
Belfast, Northern Ireland*
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Waterford, Ireland
Dublin, Ireland
Klingenthal, Alsace
Manchester, England
Priština, Kosovo
London, England
Kampala, Uganda
Cluny, France
Kidderminster, England*
Loughbrickland, Northern Ireland
Berlin, Germany*
Cambridge, England
Chişinău, Moldova*
Hucknall, Nottingham, England
New York, NY, USA*
Washington, DC, USA
Belmont, MA, USA
Dubrovnik, Croatia

So that’s 25, up from 14 last year and 17 in 2008. (I don’t seem to have tallied in the same way in previous years.) No wonder I’m looking forward to a December largely spent at home.

i) births and deaths

6 December 1932: birth of Declan Mulholland, one of the few Northern Irish actors to appear in Who, as Clark in The Sea Devils (1972) and Till in The Androids of Tara (1978).

6 December 1975: birth of Noel Clarke, who played Mickey Smith in New Who (2005-2009)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

6 December 1975: broadcast of third episode of The Android Invasion. The Doctor learns the Kraal’s plan; Sarah saves him from brainwiping; and they both stow away on the rocket to Earth.

6 December 1980: broadcast of third episode of State of Decay. Tarak rescues the Doctor and Romana, but is killed by the vampires.

6 December 1986: broadcast of second episode of The Ultimate Foe (ToaTL #14), ending Season 23. Last appearance of Colin Baker as the Doctor. The Doctor escapes the Matrix and thwarts the Master and the Valeyard. But I’d stay off the exercise bike if I were you, Doctor.

6 December 1989: broadcast of third episode of Survival, the final episode of Season 26 and indeed the very last episode of Old Who, so also the final appearances of Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, Sophie Aldred as Ace and Anthony Ainley as the Master. (See 20 August for an interesting coincidence linking those three.) The Master tries to take over the youth club in Perivale, but the Doctor lures him back to the cheetah planet and leaves him there, walking off into the sunset with Ace.

[I hadn’t realised the coincidence that the last Sixth Doctor episode was broadcast exactly three years before the last Seventh Doctor episode.)

iii) date specified in canon

6 December 1963: burial of British Army sergeant Mike Smith (as seen in Remembrance of the Daleks in 1988).

i) broadcast anniversary

5 December 1964: broadcast of “Day of Reckoning”, third episode of the story we now call The Dalek Invasion of Earth. This is the fantastic episode with Jenny, Barbara and Dortmun fleeing across London to Francis Chagrin’s amazing music, followed by Dortmun’s last stand against the Daleks.

ii) date specified in canon

5 December 1920: Kathy Nightingale is transported to Hull from 2007 by the Weeping Angels. (As seen in Blink, 2007.)

Attila and the Huns continue to ravage both halves of the Empire, particularly Italy. Eventually Attila dies in the process of getting intimate with the latest of his many wives.

The Tenth Doctor and Donna go back to the future Earth to find Susan. A brilliant piece of work by aka .

broadcast anniversaries

4 December 1965: broadcast of “The Traitors”, fourth episode of the story we now call The Daleks’ Master Plan. OMG, Katarina gets killed by a mad space criminal!!!!! Last year we had Susan leaving, this year we have a companion dying – what will they do next year, try and change the lead actor or something? (Also debut of Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom, killing off her brother Bret Vyon who was played by Nicholas Courtney.)

4 December 2003: webcast of fourth episode of Scream of the Shalka. The Doctor reclaims the Tardis, but there’s a Shalka in Alison’s head…

i) births and deaths

3 December 1928: birth of Gerald Blake, director of The Abominable Snowmen (1967) and The Invasion of Time (1978).

3 December 2006: death of Craig Hinton, author of several Who novels and a Big Finish Who audio, and inventor of the work ‘fanwank’.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

3 December 1966: broadcast of fifth episode of The Power of the Daleks. Lesterson realises what the Daleks are up to; the rebels kill the governor; and the Daleks “CON-QUER AND DE-STROY”!

3 December 1977: broadcast of second episode of The Sun Makers. Leela and K9 attempt to rescue the Doctor; he escapes but they are captured.

3 December 2006: broadcast of They Keep Killing Suzie (Torchwood), the one where the woman who died in the first episode comes back and tries to steal Gwen’s life.

A slightly disappointing Rebus novel, for once; the obvious suspects turn out to be indeed the criminals. Rankin may have been trying to write a character-based novel, and indeed he gives Rebus three good female characters to spark off (his ex who is now his boss, his new lover and his protégée) but rather forgot to supply an interesting plot to go with it, dazzled instead by these newfangled computer thingies. So not really one I would recommend highly.

At a conference last weekend, I realised that two of my fellow participants had the interesting connection that they had both been foreign ministers of their respective countries’ governments back in 1994. My phone is still not behaving perfectly, but I did at least get them to smile for the camera:

So, your challenge for today is: which two countries were these two gentlemen serving as foreign minister, sixteen years ago?

(You may choose to answer on the basis of gut feeling, though a combination of various googling techniques is more likely to work.)

Non-fiction 5 (YTD 66)
Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale – the Final Chapter, by Russell T. Davies and Benjamin Cook
The Love Letters of Henry VIII
The Cyprus Question and the EU, by Andreas Theophanous
Shakespeare (the illustrated edition), by Bill Bryson
Elizabeth and Essex, by Lytton Strachey

Fiction (non-sf) 5 (YTD 48)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
The Other Boleyn Girl, by Philippa Gregory
The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

SF (non-Who) 6 (YTD 68)
The Thunderbirds Bumper Story Book, by Dave Morris
Analog 6, edited by John W. Campbell Jr
The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald
The Book of Lost Tales I, by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien
Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home, by James Tiptree, Jr.
Utopia, by Thomas More

Doctor Who 8 (YTD 64)
The Coming of the Terraphiles, by Michael Moorcock
The Doctor Who Annual 1976
Lucifer Rising, by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
System Shock, by Justin Richards
Wolfsbane, by Jacqueline Rayner
Doctor Who Annual 1977
Placebo Effect, by Gary Russell
White Darkness, by David McIntee

Comics 2 (YTD 17)
Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, by Bryan Lee O’Malley
Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall, by Bill Willingham

6/25 (YTD 57/263) by women (McCullough, Mantel, Gregory, Desai, ‘Tiptree’/Sheldon, Rayner)
2/25 (YTD 20/263) by PoC (Desai, O’Malley)
12 owned for more than a year (The Love Letters of Henry VIII, Utopia, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [reread], The Cyprus Question and the EU, Thunderbirds Bumper Storybook, Analog 6, Placebo Effect, Lucifer Rising, The Thorn Birds, Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, The Other Boleyn Girl, 1001 Nights of Snowfall)
One reread (YTD 22/263)
~7,500 pages (YTD ~83,400)

A relatively rare example of a historical novel in the New Adventures series, taking the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Benny to Haiti on the eve of the US invasion of 1914. It is a combination of the Tardis crew getting to grips with the setting and Lovecraft pastiche, done for shudders rather than giggles – the zombies turn out to be linked to the Great Old Ones (though there is also a character from New England whose name is Howard Philips). Clearly well-researched on the Haitian background, and good coordination of the three main characters doing what they are good at. Decent stuff.

Is there an expected length of trip for TAFF winners? I seem to recall previous winners attending not only the Worldcon but travelling elsewhere on the selected continent as well.

broadcast anniversaries

2 December 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of The Ice Warriors. Victoria is recaptured by the Ice Warriors; the Doctor also falls into their clutches.

2 December 1978: broadcast of second episode of The Androids of Tara. The King’s android double is crowned; the Doctor apparently kills Princess Strella.

A short (180 pages) but colourful account of the relationship in the 1590s between Elizabeth I and the second Earl of Essex, which ended with his execution in 1601. No footnotes or much sourcing at all, which makes one a bit suspicious of its historical accuracy, though it is told in suitably dramatic terms. I knew the basics already, but Strachey catches our attention by portraying a court struggle between Cecil (the younger son of Lord Burghley, who founded the Salisbury dynasty) and Essex’s supporters, with Francis Bacon playing a key role ny switching sides and ensuring Essex’s doom; the queen then dies of a broken heart. I had not realised that Essex was actually the great-grandson of the “other Boleyn girl”, Anne’s sister Mary – indeed his grandmother was quite possibly her daughter by Henry VIII, making him the queen’s great-nephew. It also hadn’t occurred to me that he was much the most prominent courtier ever to be made Lord Deputy or Lord Lieutenant of Ireland – I had vaguely assumed that his father had held the post at some point before his horrible death, but I was wrong. The involvement of William Shakespeare in the whole thing is interesting but incidental (and anyway covered better by Shapiro).

i) births and deaths

1 December 1932: birth of Dennis Spooner, script editor / story editor of Doctor Who for first months of 1965 (from The Rescue to The Chase), also writer of The Reign of Terror (1964), The Romans (1965), The Time Meddler (1965), six of the twelve episodes of The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66) and the first episode of The Power of the Daleks (1966).

1 December 2008: death of James Bree, who played the Security Chief in The War Games (1969), Nefred the Decider in Full Circle (1980) and the Keeper of the Matrix in The Ultimate Foe (1986).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

1 December 1979: broadcast of second episode of Nightmare of Eden. More drugs, monsters, and strangely fused spaceships.

1 December 2008: broadcast of first episode of Enemy of the Bane (SJA). Mrs Wormwood returns, allied with both the Bane and the Sontarans; Sarah teams up with the Brigadier to break into UNIT.

• democracyarsenal.org: The Wikileak That Didn't Bark
  This may only be a brief interlude, but it makes for a really interesting moment in which the spotlight is on real foreign policy instead of caricature.
  (tags: usa politics)

I’ve just had another facebook friends request from someone with an amusing name. In this case her first name is ‘Nazgul’.

Apparently it’s a fairly normal girl’s name in Kyrgyzstan. But I can’t help worrying that the Ringwraiths are on my trail.