I had thought I would try and get into the habit of posting about each new Doctor Who audio play as I finished them, but the hectic events of the last couple of weeks meant that this was one intention that fell by the wayside. Three new Big Finish audios to write up, then, and the new Fourth Doctor play from the BBC. As usual I’m doing them in internal continuity order.

In timely fashion, just as I had finished watching her original televised stories (and just as she is about to return ass a guest in Sarah Jane), Jo Grant appears on Big Finish in a new Companion Chronicle, Find and Replace, encountering not only Iris Wildthyme (a disreputable Time Lady who is also played by Katy Manning) but also Huxley, one of the Novelisors of Verbatim Six (who previously appeared in Ringpullworld, a Turlough Companion Chronicle from earlier this year). Being an Iris story it is by Paul Magrs, and as often with his stories I found it a slightly mixed bag – some really wonderful character moments for both Jo and Iris, and lovely nods to nostalgia, but the plot a little confused and the means and motivation for, of all people, the Third Doctor not really satisfying. It would not really be penetrable for listeners unfamiliar with Iris as a character.

It’s Paul Magrs again, having been given a second commission to write a set of Fourth Doctor plays for the BBC. It seems that Susan Jameson’s Mrs Wibbsey, the Doctor’s housekeeper in his country retreat, is likely to be the companion figure this time, which is good as she is far more interesting than Richard Franklin’s reprise of Mike Yates (who appears briefly as an answerphone message). Demon Quest: The Relics of Time begins at a village fete where Mrs Wibbsey, somewhat improbably, has traded some vital Tardis components for several pieces of paper which show the Fourth Doctor appearing in various historical settings; they then travel back to Roman Britain (one for my classicist friends!) to find out who has been making mosaics showing the Doctor’s face. It’s slightly confusing, and I’m not wild about the Doctor as eccentric country gentleman (which of course is Baker’s own persona these days), but shows some promise for the next four episodes; the next will be set in late 19th century Paris.

The Cradle of the Snake is the best of this month’s audios. Marc Platt (who else?) brings back the Mara, with the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough visiting Manussa (setting of Snakedance) to try and set Tegan straight after Nyssa and Turlough stupidly interrupt the Doctor’s attempts to cure her of her snakey problems. I think the story is totally accessible to those who do not know either Kinda or Snakedance, or even much about Who; Peter Davison is called on to act well outside his usual comfort zone and succeeds; Platt is on form; the guest cast are good (including Vernon Dobtcheff, who was in The War Games over forty years ago, and Madeleine Potter, an American who seemed surprisingly at home in this rather British setting); and we are all set for another three stories (at least) with this particular Team Tardis next year.

Having said that I like The Cradle of the Snake best of this month’s audios, I think Project: Destiny by Cavan Scott and Mark Wright is pretty good as well, though you would need to be familiar with quite a lot of the previous Big Finish range to appreciate it fully – I went back and listened again to Project: Twilight and Project: Lazarus, which feature Hex’s mother Cassie, and also to The Harvest, which introduces him and the hospital of St Gart’s to which we now return, and even his most recent appearance in The Angel of Scutari, but I should have also taken in No Man’s Land and maybe even Thicker Than Water. (Mind you, those are almost all excellent stories, so perhaps make a decent listening project as such.) Poor old Hex finds that the hospital and indeed London have been taken over by sinister external forces, and that the Doctor has known more about his background than he was letting on for a very long time; meanwhile the sinister Nimrod, leader of The Forge, a Torchwood-like research centre but much less sexy, is maturing his own evil plans. It’s very well executed, and again the guest cast are on top of things. I was rather hoping that it would all turn out to be a dream at one point, but in fact am content with the way it works out.

So in summary: The Cradle of the Snake is excellent and will appeal to anyone with even the vaguest notion of the Fifth Doctor era; Project: Destiny is also very good but more for those who know a lot of the previous Big Finish plays; Find and Replace has its moments; and Demon Quest: The Relics of Time fills up an hour without causing offence.

I am saving some of these for later days, so here I just want to briefly salute the hilariously disastrous dinner party which takes place half way through Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign. Really, explaining it takes too long; it’s the high point of a very entertaining book.

“Pym!” The Countess spotted a new victim, and her voice went a little dangerous. “I seconded you to look after Miles. Would you care to explain this scene?”
There was a thoughtful pause. In a voice of simple honesty, Pym replied, “No, Milady.”

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

Like a lot of other people, I was saddened and disgusted by Elizabeth Moon’s recent comments on Islam. (For those who don’t know about this: Moon, a fairly prominent writer of what is generally termed ‘military sf’, who also won a Nebula award for a novel about autism, wrote a rambling and offensive screed about the duties of Muslims in the US to be more sensitive to people like her if they want to be worthy of citizenship, let alone building places of worship in downtown New York, because of what a small number of their co-religionists from outside the US did nine years ago. I won’t link to it but if you haven’t seen it it won’t be difficult to find.)

For me, of course, it rang a particular bell; quite apart from my sympathy with my Muslim friends and relatives who have to put up with this kind of thing day in day out, I am not unacquainted with the position of being in a minority group, seeing people parading outside my front door celebrating that they are more equal citizens than I am, and accused of being a supporter of terrorism on the grounds of my religious background. It was not very difficult for me to read Moon’s piece and mentally substitute ‘Catholic’ or ‘Irish’ where she put ‘Muslim’, with the context switched to the other side of the Atlantic.

(And while I know some readers sympathised with, and possibly even participated in, the recent protests against the Pope’s visit to the UK, I hope they were wary of the company they were keeping. I don’t like Benedict XVI much, but I don’t like bigotry either. The always readable Laurie Penny has a very sane leftist take on the affair.)

Anyway, another parallel suggested itself to me reading the various views about Moon’s proposed attendance at WisCon 2011 as one of its Guests of Honour. WisCon proudly proclaims itself as a ‘Feminist sf convention’ and the organising committee quickly moved to distance themselves from Moon’s remarks, though without formally withdrawing the invitation; the other guest of honour has appealed to those who were offended by Moon’s remarks to attend the convention anyway.

It reminded me of the incident about a year ago when a friend of mine was actually banned from his local sf convention (no links; those who were involved will certainly remember the incident I’m talking about which got a lot of coverage online at the time). That seemed to me a fairly clear case of a decision which was bad and wrong: no reason was formally given for the banning, though there were dark mutterings about events two years previously (which, as I had in fact been present myself on that occasion, did not seem to me an adequate explanation). While the convention were clearly within their rights to ban anyone they wished not to see, the decision did not seem fair or justified and damaged their reputation. In the end the ban was rescinded and a public statement of reconciliation made by both sides.

But it did make me consider the question of what level of misbehaviour should be sufficient to make such a decision fair or justified. It’s a slightly different topic, but I remember two friends of mine disinviting someone from their wedding at the last minute because he had grossly offended them in the pub the night before. That seemed to me fair and justified. If I were the WisCon committee, I would consider Moon’s behaviour to be of that order of gravity; a decision to remove her Guest of Honour status would seem fair and justified to me, and would not damage WisCon’s reputation. Indeed as things stand, the only justification I can see for their not taking that decision is the hope that Moon will issue some adequate apology for and withdrawal of her remarks.

Of course, this is commentary from another continent from someone who wasn’t likely to attend WisCon anyway (my only con this year was DiscWorld – had hoped to go to BeneluxCon down the road in Antwerp but must now travel that weekend), and I’m sure that those concerned will give my views the attention they deserve. But I have certainly had the experience of deliberately deciding not to attend particular events because of wanting to avoid other people who I knew would be present, and I feel very much for those who were looking forward to next year’s WisCon and now are not. Moon’s co-Guest of Honour hopes that “Elizabeth Moon will have things to say to the community at large, and apologies to deliver”. Well, we’ll see.

births and deaths

26 September 1909: birth of Leonard Sachs, who played Admiral de Coligny in The Massacre (1966) and President Borusa in Arc of Infinity (1983)

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This is a slightly difficult question to answer. Looking through my LibraryThing catalogue (yet again) I find I have given five stars to the following books originally published in languages other than English:

Albanian: The File on H
Anglo-Saxon: Beowulf
Chinese: Wild Swans
Dutch: The Diary of Anne Frank
French: Persepolis I, Persepolis II, Candide, Madame Bovary, Proust I, Proust III, Proust VI, The Little Prince
German: Ali and Nino (as mentioned previously)
Greek: Oedipus Rex, The Iliad
Icelandic: Njal’s Saga
Italian: Survival in Auschwitz, The Divine Comedy
Latin: Ovid’s Erotic Poems, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Twelve Cæsars
Portuguese: Blindness
Russian: The Master and Margarita
Serbian: Impossible Stories

I guess the most impressive translation of those above is Heaney’s Beowulf, because it is such a different worldview that he is trying to convey and yet remain faithful to the spirit of the original. But in a sense it is a mere detail that the books are translated. We’re always approaching literature on the basis of our own experiences, rather than the author’s, so every reading is a translation across human experience.

I do have two other approaches to literature in translation. One is to simply buy a book that I already know well in a language that I want to learn; I can’t say I have done this often but there are a couple of translated Zelazny and Tolkien volumes in French and Dutch on the shelves (and a Serbian Autostoperski vodič kroz galaksiju by ‘Daglas Adams’, which I haven’t read).

The other is the Bible, where there are so many translations available that I can try several different versions and see if I feel I can get closer to the original text despite my minimal Greek and non-existent Hebrew. I’ve written before on, for instance, the subtle distinction between ἐκθαμβέω in Mark 16.6 and φοβέω in Mark 16.8. Here’s another one: One of the most evocative single verses of the Old Testament for me is Ecclesiastes 11.1, which in the King James version is translated ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.’ I have no idea how close this is to the Hebrew ‘שלח לחמך על פני המים כי ברב הימים תמצאנו׃’ and I note with interest that while the original המים seems to just mean ‘water’, the Greek version has “on the surface of the water” (ἐπὶ πρόσωπον τοῦ ὕδατος) and the Latin “on the running waters” (super transeuntes aquas), and various translators have chosen to go with the Latin or Greek development of the original (rather than, as King James’s team did, sticking to the original in this case). But we will never quite capture the meaning of the precious water, and the risky act of casting valuable foodstuffs onto it, to the parched agriculturalists of the 4th century before our era. Edited to add: nor will any translation ever catch the resonance between “המים” (waters) and “הימים” (days).

(And the unspeakable Good News Bible has ‘Invest your money in foreign trade, and one of these days you will make a profit.’ I kid you not.)

My day job is full of translations of which I am unaware – I am fortunate to operate in a multinational, multicultural environment where the main operating language is my native one. So it is easy to forget how fortunate I am, and answering this question has helped remind me.

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

Went to see B this morning, who was very chirpy and apparently has been notably so since her exciting stay in hospital. We had a fun walk round the pools at Hélécine, and got back in time for her rather early lunch.

On my way home I took advantage of the good weather and tried to get some decent pictures of one of the local ancient religious sites. It is an odd little chapel, Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ten-Steen (“Our Lady of the Stone”) on the outskirts of Tienen. My first picture was certainly the best, capturing it from the south against a partly cloudy but bright sky:

In the above picture you can just about see the Stone for which the church was named at the bottom left of the back of the building. I went for a close-up picture, where you can see it nestling discreetly in a bed of plants (would be interested to know what plants). The first time I went there I bumped into one of the locals, and asked him if the stone had had any religious significance. He flatly denied the possibility; it might, he said vaguely, have been a totally non-religious boundary marker in ancient times, for the point where three tribes’ territories met. Yeah, right.

The Baroque door to the church has the date of its construction, 1699, written over it (should just about be visible in the picture below). I suspect that like our own local church (picture in the icon for this post) some of the fabric is a good deal older than that; there is known to have been a chapel on the site in 1331, part of a leper asylum, and there are legends of Benedictines and virgins from much earlier. Of course, the presence of the Stone suggests a much longer tradition.

The inside of the church is maintained by an ancient confraternity, and the main nave is dominated by a portrait of the confraternity’s members in the eighteenth century – badly restored and due to the lighting impossible to photograph, so you’ll have to take my word for it that that is what is on the left here:

But the side chapel is the more interesting bit of the internal fabric – dedicated to St Maurus, who is supposed to have introduced Benedictine practices into ancient Gaul. This is fairly dubious. St Maurus’ personal connections with this particular part of Gaul are pretty minimal, and I must assume that he has taken over the job of the pre-Christian local deity. (Though the church was apparently originally founded by Benedictines, so I may be being unfair.)

Most remarkably, St Maurus, at least in the Church of Our Lady of the Stone, cures mental disorders (which in Dutch are referred to as “geestelijke stoornissen”, which could be also translated as “spiritual disturbances”). At his feet are a set of iron crowns, which if worn by sufferers who are performing the correct ritual, may offer relief.

It is interesting that this altar is set against the inside of the same wall against which the ancient Stone leans on the outside. I also find it an interesting coincidence that Tienen is home to the Delacroix foundation which cares for those with very serious mental handicaps, including my own daughter B. It would seem that there was a local tradition of involvement long before the Delacroix family took action in 1950.

That’s not all. Every January 16, pilgrims assemble and walk thirteen times between the Church of Our Lady of the Stone and the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Hakendover, the next village. This commemorates the legend that at the end of the seventh century, three Hakendover virgins decided to build a church dedicated to the Redeemer, a process which involved various miraculous occurrences (a bird bringing them a letter from God to show where the church should be built, Jesus himself turning up to help the construction process, local bishops being struck down by God for their arrogance, etc). The virgins are supposedly buried at Our Lady of the Stone. (And that’s not to mention the curious Easter Monday ritual with horses that takes place in Hakendover, which is another story.) Here is a copy of a 1909 picture of the January pilgrimage, displayed in the church:

Belgium is nominally a traditionally Christian and Catholic country; but a lot of local cult practices have much more ancient roots.

broadcast anniversaries

25 September 1965: broadcast of “Air Lock”, third episode of the story we now call Galaxy 4. Vicki is captured by the Rills, but persuades the Doctor to help them; Steven is threatened with asphyxiation by the Drahvins.

25 September 1976: broadcast of fourth episode of The Masque of Mandragora. The brotherhood attempt to infiltrate the masque at the gathering of Renaissance savants, but the Doctor and Sarah foil their plan.

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I’ve given a partial answer to this with the earlier question about books I hateDoctor Who – The Twin Dilemma and Doctor Who – Slipback are simply dire. There is admittedly more merit in his Doctor Who and the Visitation, which I think may have been written first, before he thought he knew what he was doing.

Nigel Robinson deserves some credit for his editorial and political skills in keeping the Doctor Who books going over the years. Unfortunately he is a bad writer; there is no way to sweeten the pill. His novelisations of The Underwater Menace, The Sensorites and The Edge of Destruction, while admittedly not working with the best material of the black-and-white era, add nothing to the stories seen on screen; his early New Adventure novel is one of the worst of that sequence; his two recent Companion Chronicles have been underwhelming. I will admit that I thought he did better with his novelisation of The Time Meddler, but that was a richer seam.

Keith Topping wrote two of my least favourite Who Books, the Telos novella Ghost Ship which is the weakest of a range which was not terribly strong, and Byzantium! which has utterly anachronistic minarets in the city now known as Istanbul, in a story set 250 years before it became Constantinople. I have a couple of non-fiction books on the shelves co-authored by him, which are a bit better, but my suspicion is that he is simply a dreadful fiction writer. Seeing his name on the spine or front cover of a book would certainly determine me not to buy it.

This seems a bit ungracious of me. I should say that most authors who I have met or interacted with in person have been pretty charming, even if I don’t actually like their writing and have said so in public; and I want to give a particular shout-out to Catherine Asaro, towards whose writing I have been consistently hostile, but who chose to engage me with grace and generosity (though I’m afraid it didn’t change my take on her work).

That was a difficult one (as demonstrated by the fact that it took me an extra day). The next questions are much easier.

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

Planet of the Daleks is one of the rare cases where my opinion of the story has dropped largely as a result of watching it in sequence. Picked randomly out of a set of Old Who stories, it seems inoffensive enough; but eight years on from The Daleks’ Master Plan, it’s more obviously a rehash of Terry Nation’s previous Dalek stories, combining various elements from them without bringing much new to it, a collage of bits of First Doctor space fantasy except in colour this time. This is the third consecutive future history story (after Carnival of Monsters and Frontier in Space and the least Pertwee-ish of this un-Pertwee-ish format.

Having said that, it’s not all that bad. Katy Manning is actually called on to act a bit more than usual, both bravely coping with the Doctor’s condition and her own fungal problems, and then dealing with Latep’s affections later on, and she rises to the challenge. Bernard Horsfall and Jane How are good as the Thals. The jungle doesn’t look too much like a studio set. But the plot is too padded, and we never find out what happened to the Doctor’s appeal to the Time Lords.

I have a soft spot for The Green Death, which was I think the first Who DVD I bought. Watched in sequence, it is more apparent that the story is Inferno meets The War Machines in Wales. But those were both good stories, and I think Sloman has improved on them – BOSS beats WOTAN any day, and the chemicals causing maggots to mutate is more plausible than people turning into cavemen after touching Schumann’s gas. It is a decently Lettsian political story as well, the pit closures, hippy environmentalists, and subject of Welsh nationalism all making it feel contemporary.

Of the four Old Who companions who get married off (I do not count Peri) Jo gets by far the best closure (and is the only one to end up hitched to a bloke from her own space and time). Episode Three of The Green Death is surely the most erotic of Old Who, with the lovers almost kissing and the cliffhanger of the maggot lustfully approaching Jo’s bared back. And the final shot of the Doctor driving sadly away from Jo’s engagement party, which apparently took four hours to set up, still brings a tear to the eye.

One of the most unexpected results of my rewatchathon has been that I have come round to Jo. In comparison with the rather feisty companions of New Who, she seems both prototype and stereotype; but in fact she is the first proper incarnation of the key female lead, with an intense and personal relationship with the Doctor, intended to be the audience’s main identification figure. It’s a new departure for the programme, and she is the measure that all the others have to match up to (even if, admittedly, many of them do surpass her). Establishing her as a constant, after the fairly rapid turnover of companions in the first seven seasons, was presumably a later decision (she could after all have left in 1971 had she wanted to), but also changed the dynamic and the expectations of future companions’ longevity. The by-product of her presence is of course the downgrading of the importance of the UNIT characters (even as they are increased in strength with Mike Yates and the upgrading of Benton to semi-regular), but in a way that gives us the kind of ensemble basis for the show which New Who has picked up so successfully; by far the most interesting of the new regular characters apart from Jo is the evil Master. It is interesting to note that both Russell T Davies (born April 1963) and Steven Moffat (born December 1961) would have been watching her stories in their formative years.

Jo features in several of my top Who novelisations – Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons, Doctor Who and the Dæmons, Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, Doctor Who and the Three Doctors, Doctor Who and the Space War [Frontier in Space], and Doctor Who and the Green Death. Big Finish’s latest Companion Chronicle, Find and Replace, unites Jo with the disreputable Iris Wildthyme, a renegade Time Lord who claims to be the Doctor’s ex-girlfriend and is also played by Katy Manning, in what is surely going to be one of the classics of the range.

With Jo having acquired extra legitimacy through longevity, The Time Warrior has the difficult task of introducing the first new companion for three years. But it is also the first story with a historical setting since The Highlanders, which incidentally was also the introductory story for a long-lasting companion (Jamie), which in itself is rather a good signal that the show is still capable of pulling surprises (which is just as well, considering the disappointments in store later in the season). The medieval stuff – Dot Cotton and Boba Fett in alliance against the bad guys – is actually rather well done, to the point that you don’t realise that there is only one castle playing two roles. The Sontarans are off to a good start, and there’s a satisfying bang at the end as the castle blows up.

It’s interesting to note that Sarah actually looks rather boyish here – pageboy haircut, understated bust, wearing trousers rather than skirt – which reinforces the point that the companion is meant to be the audience identification figure, and perhaps makes her easier for small boys to relate to than the much more girly Jo would have been. One can’t take this too far – she is certainly femme rather than butch – but it strikes me that after the first seven seasons of regular characters who just happen to be hanging around the Tardis and the Doctor, we have here the consolidation and further development of the Jo Grant dynamic.

One further character note about the Doctor – we have a bit of a reshaping of the role of the Time Lords here, as galactic ticket-inspectors; and this is also the story where the Doctor says he is serious about what he does, but not necessarily the way he does it. Unmoored from the UNIT setting, this is a new Pertwee in some ways, and we are allowed to sympathise with Sarah to a certain extent when she mistakes him for the villain rather than the hero of the story.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs was Malcolm Hulke’s last story for Doctor Who, and it must be said that with the rather central exception of the dinosaurs it is rather good. It is a shame about the dinosaurs, especially the tyrannosaurus / brontosaurus fight in episode 6 which is a real low point. The assembly of talent among the guest cast is excellent – Martin Jarvis, Peter Miles, Carmen Silvera, John Bennett, Noel Johnson, all had been on Who before and/or would be again, and all take it seriously (I guess they coudn’t see the dinosaurs for the most part).

Hulke takes it seriously too; his sympathies are of course with the New Earth folks, but his message is one of working for revolution and change within the system. Mike Yates’ treachery is the most interesting thing that has been done with a regular character since Katarina and Sara were killed off. It’s a shame that Richard Franklin never quite rises to the challenge, but it twists Hulke’s narrative from being a relatively safe tale of rooting out the dodgy bits of the establishment to a nasty one where your own household may turn against you.

Sarah and the Doctor are awfully cuddly now, especially in their exchange about Florana at the end! NB that this is the second story in a row about bad guys using time travel to transport their innocent pawns between different periods of Earth history.

With Death to the Daleks we have our second Terry Nation story of this half-dozen. It is actually rather similar to Planet of the Daleks, in that it feels like it has escaped from the Hartnell era (except for the music, on which more below), but the good bits are better and the bad bits are worse. On the good side, the plot is considerably more original than PotD, with the Daleks losing power and being forced to cooperate with the Doctor and the crashed humans, and finding themselves equally under threat from the creepy cultists. Good old John Abineri is there, and Duncan Lamont is great as the grizzled and ultimately self-sacrificing Galloway, likewise Arnold Yarrow as Bellal (and I wonder what happened to Joy Harrison who played Jill Tarrant).

But, but… the music. It’s really bad. I can’t remember anything this bad since The Chase which similarly had experimental scoring and Daleks, but unlike this story The Chase was actually meant to be funny. I’m sure you can do good music for Doctor Who with saxophones, and I know that Carey Blyton did better on both Doctor Who and the Silurians and Revenge of the Cybermen, but it utterly fails to come together here. The worst is the comedy horror leitmotif for the Daleks themselves, but it’s all pretty awful.

Also, the puzzle traps in the living city are very poor. The first one appears to be a simple spot-the-difference test; the maze which is the only way out of the room filled with skeletons doesn’t seem so very difficult (certainly the Daleks solve it pretty fast); and the floor game is just silly. A further minor gripe: Sarah’s bikini is not terribly sexy (though of course that is no crime) and I think that there must still be an Exxilon or two wandering around the Tardis.

The Monster of Peladon is a set of good-ish concepts that fails to be the sum of its parts. Sarah’s attempts to educate Queen Thalira in feminism seem awfully earnest now, but probably sounded more startling at the time; the theme of the miners revolting actually reflected what was happening in Britain at the time, when the Prime Minister of the day went to the polls on the slogan, ‘Who governs Britain?’ and the voters replied ‘Not you, mate!’ The resolution of the political plot also turns out to be a bit of Cold War style politics with Eckersley exposed as the proxy for the other superpower. And Pertwee gets a dress rehearsal for dying in the next story.

But it doesn’t really work well, and it’s the third story in a row for which this is the case. There’s a bit of a feeling of the old team running out of steam (though the chemistry between Pertwee and Sladen remains charming and totally believable). The Doctor gets most un-Doctorishly bloodthirsty when he starts disintegrating Ice Warriors left, right and centre. While some of the guest cast (notably Donald Gee as Eckersley and the Ice Warriors themselves) are rather good, Nina Thomas’s Queen Thalira is very flat indeed (with her shoulders permanently pulled up to her ears, she reminds me rather of Diana Spencer in that awful pre-wedding interview in 1981). And I think I watched the second episode but don’t remember anything about it, and suspect it may not have been necessary to the plot. Not the only Pertwee story that would have been better at two-thirds the length, but one of the best examples of the phenomenon.

So there we are – tantalisingly one story away from the next regeneration. My opinion of The Time Warrior has been raised by watching it in sequence, because of the refreshing reboot of the Doctor/companion relationship; my opinion of Planet of the Daleks, on the other hand, has been lowered. I think I also appreciate the good points of Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and deplore the weaknesses of Death to the Daleks, a little more as a result of watching this.

I am now 46% through the Old Who stories, 53% by screen minutes, 54% by episodes, and 40% of the time from November 1963 to December 1989 has elapsed. (The half-way mark in screen minutes is, I think, during episode 1 of The Time WarriorPlanet of the Daleks.)

< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >

I know that there are five candidates running for the position of Leader of the UK’s Labour Party, whose result is to be announced tomorrow.

But is there also an election for the position of Deputy Leader, which was narrowly won by Harriet Harman (now in her last 24 hours as acting Leader) back in 2007? Or does she stay on as Deputy until she too resigns?

Usual procedure for book memes: bold if I’ve read it, italics if I’ve started but haven’t finished it, struck through if I couldn’t stand it. Discussion welcome here but probably better directed to Ian Sales’ post here (revised from his original list). Writers are listed from 1 to 55 but there are in fact 77 distinct works. Only six women out of 55, three writers from Northern Ireland, no books post-1995 (I suppose to be a ‘masterwork’ you need to have demonstrated longevity).

1 – The Time Machine, HG Wells (1895)
2 – Last And First Men, Olaf Stapledon (1930)
3 – Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
4 – Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell (1949)
5 – The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)
6 – The Death of Grass, John Christopher (1956)
7 – No Man Friday, Rex Gordon (1956)
8 – The Space-Born, EC Tubb (1956)
9 – On The Beach, Nevil Shute (1957)
10 – WASP, Eric Frank Russell (1958)
11 – A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
12 – The Drowned World, JG Ballard (1962)
13 – Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)
14 – A Man of Double Deed, Leonard Daventry (1965)
15 – A Far Sunset, Edmund Cooper (1967)
16 – The Revolt of Aphrodite [Tunc, Nunquam], Lawrence Durrell (1968 – 1970)
17 – Pavane, Keith Roberts (1968)
18 – Stand On Zanzibar, John Brunner (1968)
19 – Behold The Man, Michael Moorcock (1969)
20 – Ninety-eight Point Four, Christopher Hodder-Williams (1969)
21 – Junk Day, Arthur Sellings (1970)
22 – T-City trilogy [Interface, Volteface, Multiface] Mark Adlard (1971 – 1975)
23 – The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, DG Compton (1973)
24 – Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke (1973)
25 – Collision with Chronos, Barrington Bayley (1973)
26 – Inverted World, Christopher Priest (1974)
27 – The Centauri Device, M John Harrison (1974)
28 – Hello Summer, Goodbye, Michael G Coney (1975)
29 – Orbitsville [Orbitsville, Orbitsville Departure, Orbitsville Judgement], Bob Shaw (1975 – 1990)
30 – The Alteration, Kingsley Amis (1976)
31 – The White Bird of Kinship [The Road to Corlay, A Dream of Kinship, A Tapestry of Time], Richard Cowper (1978 – 1982)
32 – SS-GB, Len Deighton (1978)
33 – Canopus in Argos: Archives [Shikasta, The Marriages Between Zones 3, 4 and 5, The Sirian Experiments, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire], Doris Lessing (1979 – 1983)
34 – The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy [The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, Mostly Harmless], Douglas Adams (1979 – 1992)
35 – Where Time Winds Blow, Robert Holdstock (1981)
36 – The Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee (1981)
37 – Cageworld [Search for the Sun!, The Lost Worlds of Cronus, The Tyrant of Hades, Star-Search], Colin Kapp (1982 – 1984)
38 – Helliconia [Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter], Brian W Aldiss (1982 – 1985)
39 – Orthe, Mary Gentle (1983 – 1987)
40 – Chekhov’s Journey, Ian Watson (1983)
41 – In Limbo, Christopher Evans (1985)
42 – Queen of the States, Josephine Saxton (1986)
43 – Wraeththu Chronicles [The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, The Bewitchments of Love and Hate, The Fulfilments of Fate and Desire], Storm Constantine (1987 – 1989)
44 – Code Blue – Emergency!, James White (1987)
45 – Kairos, Gwyneth Jones (1988)
46 – The Empire of Fear, Brian Stableford (1988)
47 – Desolation Road, Ian McDonald (1988)
48 – The Child Garden, Geoff Ryman (1989)
49 – Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland (1990)
50 – Wulfsyarn, Phillip Mann (1990)
51 – Use of Weapons, Iain M Banks (1990)
52 – Vurt, Jeff Noon (1993)
53 – The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter (1995)
55 – Fairyland, Paul J Mcauley (1995)

i) births and deaths

24th September 1925: birth of Gary Downie, production manager on the later years of Old Who, partner of producer John Nathan-Turner, and editor of the immortal Doctor Who Cookbook.

24th September 1939: birth of Maurice Colbourne who played Lytton in Resurrection of the Daleks (1984) and Attack of the Cybermen (1985).

24th September 1951: birth of David Banks, who played the Cyber-leader in Earthshock (1982), The Five Doctors (1983), Attack of the Cybermen (1985), and Silver Nemesis (1988) and also wrote the New Adventures novel Iceberg (1993).

ii) broadcast anniversaries

24th September 1966: broadcast of third episode of The Smugglers. It’s the Doctor’s turn to escape from his captors by magic; and everyone comes to the church for the final confrontation.

24th September 1977: broadcast of fourth episode of Horror of Fang Rock. The alien is revealed as a Rutan; the Doctor destroys its ship with a laser, and Leela’s eyes change from brown to blue.

24th September 1993: broadcast of the fifth and, thank God, last episode of The Paradise of Death on BBC Radio. Does it help if I tell you that in the climactic scene, the president’s son is mauled to death in an arena by a giant toad? No, I thought not.

24th September 2007: on a much happier note, first broadcast of both parts of Revenge of the Slitheen, which kicks off the first regular season of the Sarah Jane Adventures. Maria and Luke, with Sarah Jane and their new friend Clyde, discover that the Slitheen have taken over their school; but are able to destroy them with vinegar.

• Chrononaut: Many writers have all the virtues of civilized persons
  One of the best comments on the recent nastiness.
  (tags: islam sf)
• YouTube – Do you want to know more about Belgium?
  Explains everything.
  (tags: belgium)
• (live blog) And the UUP leader is … Tom « Slugger O'Toole
  Liveblogging the UUP leadership election
  (tags: uup northernireland)

This is an anthology of classic sf stories – and classic pieces of sf criticism – assembled in the mid- 1990s on behalf of the Science Fiction Research Association. I found it somewhat frustrating and slightly incomprehensible. There is very little editorial apparatus to help the reader appreciate whatever point the editors are trying to make; some groupings of stories do have a clear linking theme, others less so. While the editors declare their intention to skip the classics of the 1940s-1960s, the collection does include five pieces from that era, which seems a bit inconsistent. The non-fiction pieces of sf criticism interspersed through the stories are of varying degrees of accessibility, and here I really felt the lack of an editorial voice explaining why another 30 pages of this vast tome had been dedicated to a particular commentator’s meanderings. I found Algis Budrys’ piece, “Paradise Charted”, incomprehensible. On the other hand I very much appreciated Sam Delany’s “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’ – or, the Conscience of the King’. On the fiction side, most of the stories that I liked were pieces I already knew – I bought the book in the first place because it had three joint Hugo/Nebula winners, “Blood Music”, “Ender’s Game” and “Bears Discover Fire”, none of which is a particular favourite of mine, and that should perhaps have warned me that few of the other stories would really blow me away. The one story that did grab the soppy romantic in me was Kate Wilhelm’s “Forever Yours, Anna”. But I was left rather wondering what the point of the anthology was.

i) births and deaths

23rd September 1949: birth of Floella Benjamin (now Baroness Benjamin of Beckenham) who played the recurring character Professor Rivers in the first three seasons of the Sarah Jane Adventures.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

23rd September 1967: broadcast of fourth episode of Tomb of the Cybermen. The Cybermen kill Kaftan; Toberman helps the others to freeze the Cybermen again, at the cost of his own life.

23rd September 1978: broadcast of fourth episode of The Ribos Operation. The Doctor is rescued by the shrivenzale, blows up the Graff, and converts the jethrik into the first segment of the Key to Time.

• diggerdydum: The Real Actual Long Game
  First in a series of eighteen polls, taking all the 216 Doctor Who stories so far, and voting for them a dozen at a time. If you haven't voted yet, you can do so in the next six days.

  In the first poll, choose from Gridlock, Image Of The Fendahl, The Caves Of Androzani, The Deadly Assassin, The Eleventh Hour, The Happiness Patrol, The Highlanders, The Long Game, The Sensorites, The Time Monster, The Visitation and The War Games

  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Army Of Ticks
  choose from Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday, Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways, Castrovalva, Enlightenment, Planet Of Evil, Silver Nemesis, The Armageddon Factor, The Daemons, The Tenth Planet, The Tomb Of The Cybermen, The Web Planet and Victory Of The Daleks
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: The Claws Of Ticksos
  choose from Four To Doomsday, Smith And Jones, The Ark In Space, The Aztecs, The Beast Below, The Claws Of Axos, The Curse Of Fenric, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Kings Demons, The Talons Of Weng Chiang, The War Machines and The Web Of Fear
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Planet Of FITE!
  choose from Carnival Of Monsters, Planet Of Fire, Shada, Terror Of The Vervoids, The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, The End Of Time, The Face Of Evil, The Fires Of Pompeii, The Invasion Of Time, The Smugglers, The Wheel In Space and Tooth And Claw
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Day Of The Polleks
  choose from Black Orchid, Day Of The Daleks, Love And Monsters, Partners In Crime, Silence In The Library/Forest Of The Dead, Survival, The Crusade, The Krotons, The Massacre, The Pirate Planet, The Sontaran Experiment and Warriors Of The Deep
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Poll Reunion
  choose from Ghost Light, Kinda, Planet Of The Dead, School Reunion, Terror Of The Autons, Terror Of The Zygons, The Ambassadors Of Death, The Ark, The Chase, The Horns Of Nimon, The Mysterious Planet and The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Tick-Flight!
  choose from Blink, Dalek, Death To The Daleks, Revelation Of The Daleks, Robot, The Creature From The Pit, The Dalek Master Plan, The End Of The World, The Enemy Of The World, The Romans, Time-Flight and Vampires In Venice
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Ticks And The Rani
  choose from Frontier In Space, Full Circle, Revenge Of The Cybermen, Terminus, The Invisible Enemy, The Savages, The Space Pirates, The Stolen Earth/Journey's End, The Time Meddler, The Unicorn And The Wasp, The Unquiet Dead and Time And The Rani
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: The Monster Of Polladon
  choose from Amy's Choice, Attack Of The Cybermen, Delta And The Bannermen, Snakedance, Spearhead From Space, The Edge Of Destruction, The Gunfighters, The Idiot's Lantern, The Monster Of Peladon, The Ribos Operation, The Time Warrior and Utopia/The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Time Lords
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Tick Left
  choose from Aliens Of London/World War III, Battlefield, State Of Decay, The Daleks, The Dominators, The Hand Of Fear, The Mind Of Evil, The Power Of The Daleks, The Runaway Bride, The Sun Makers, Turn Left and Vengeance On Varos
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: The Celestial Tickmaker
  choose from Horror Of Fang Rock, Mawdryn Undead, Planet Of The Ood, Remembrance Of The Daleks, Rise Of The Cybermen/The Age Of Steel, The Celestial Toymaker, The Green Death, The Masque Of Mandragora, The Reign Of Terror, The Seeds Of Death, The Time Of Angels/Flesh And Stone and The Two Doctors
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: The Tickspeare Code
  choose from An Unearthly Child, Inferno, Mission To The Unknown, New Earth, Rose, The Androids Of Tara, The Brain Of Morbius, The Doctor's Daughter, The Leisure Hive, The Sea Devils, The Shakespeare Code and Timelash
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: The Keeper Of Ticken
  choose from Galaxy 4, Midnight, Mindwarp, Resurrection Of The Daleks, The Christmas Invasion, The Curse Of Peladon, The Ice Warriors, The Keeper Of Traken, The Macra Terror, The Power Of Kroll, The Seeds Of Doom and The Waters Of Mars
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: The Tick Of The Rani
  choose from Arc Of Infinity, Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks, Dragonfire, Fathers Day, Fury From The Deep, Planet Of The Spiders, The Evil Of The Daleks, The Mark Of The Rani, The Mutants, The Next Doctor, The Rescue and The Robots Of Death
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: The Tickless Ones
  choose from City Of Death, Colony In Space, Earthshock, Fear Her, Human Nature/The Family Of Blood, Marco Polo, The Abominable Snowmen, The Faceless Ones, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, The Stones Of Blood, The Twin Dilemma and The Ultimate Foe
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Pollage Of The Damned
  choose from Destiny Of The Daleks, Logopolis, Planet Of The Daleks, The Android Invasion, The Five Doctors, The Girl In The Fireplace, The Greatest Show In The Galaxy, The Keys Of Marinus, The Lodger, The Mind Robber, The Underwater Menace and Voyage Of The Damned
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Doctor Who And The Pollurians
  choose from Doctor Who And The Silurians, Genesis Of The Daleks, Invasion Of The Dinosaurs, Nightmare Of Eden, Paradise Towers, Planet Of Giants, The Awakening, The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, The Lazarus Experiment, The Myth Makers, Vincent And The Doctor and Warriors' Gate
  (tags: doctorwho)
• diggerdydum: Ticklos
  choose from 42, Boom Town, Doctor Who [the movie], Frontios, Meglos, The Invasion, The Moonbase, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang, The Pyramids Of Mars, The Three Doctors, The Space Museum, and Underworld
  (tags: doctorwho)

When the question is asked that way, one is tempted to reply in the spirit of Wendy Cope:

When they ask me, “Who’s your favourite poet?”,
I’d better not mention you.
Though you certainly are my favourite poet
And I like your poems too.

Rest assured that if you are a writer, and you know me well enough to be reading this, you probably fall into that category, if not quite in the biblical sense that Wendy Cope probably had in mind.

Anyway, I have a lot of favourite writers, in the sense of people whose works I like rather than people who I like who happen to be writers. (See my LibraryThing author cloud.) I thought of recounting here my teenage appreciation of Zelazny, my more recent experimentation with Hemingway, my lifelong obsession with Tolkien, my enjoyment of Bujold and/or Le Guin. But if I ask myself which of my favourite authors hasn’t yet featured in this meme, there is one name that jumps out at me: Brian Aldiss. Ever since I discovered his slightly awkward, sometimes passionate, occasionally baroque storytelling, I have enjoyed and admired his writing – particularly his short stories from the 1960s and 1970s (and rather less so the Helliconia trilogy). He has the gift of leaving the reader with a lasting image in the mind’s eye; he is hardly ever cute or over the top, and rarely even comfortable. I guess that for those who don’t know his writing, the collection variously titled Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand or The Canopy of Time is a good place to start, and then move on to the earlier novels and then Helliconia if you have the energy. I still find him refreshing and relaxing to return to.

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

There has been much speculation that if Sinn Féin were to ‘win’ next year’s elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly next year, Martin McGuinness wil therefore automatically end up as First Minister; and in the course of the general election campaign this spring, and the UUP leadership election (which concludes this evening) since then, much has been made of the idea that if the Unionist parties are not united, McGuinness’ assent to the top spot is all but inevitable.

Now, it is not improbable (though I think unlikely) that Sinn Féin will be the largest party in terms of votes in next tear’s election. They topped the poll in both 2009 (for the European Parliament) and 2010 (for the Westminster election) as follows:

SF’s position at the top of the table in both elections was essentially achieved not so much by their own merits but by the DUP shedding support to the TUV in the European election, and by its support of independent candidates in two otherwise promising constituencies, North Down and Fermanagh-South Tyrone. Had the DUP contested either constituency in May, they would certainly have gained more than the 3700 votes necessary to top the right-hand side of this table.

It is worth pointing out, of course, that Assembly elections have often tended to provoke fragmentation among Unionists; that the TUV had a poor Westminster election but may have a better Assembly election; and that SF may be able to squeeze the SDLP still further than they have already done next May. But my own gut feeling is that any fragmentation will be more than compensated for by the return to party voting in North Down and FST; that the TUV are a busted flush; and that SF’s vote in 2009 and 2010, though impressive, was actually down from its historic high of 26.2% in the 2007 Assembly election. Other things being equal (normalement, as we say in Belgium) I therefore expect the DUP to return to the top spot next year.

In any case, it doesn’t matter much to the appointment of the heads of the government. The St Andrew Agreement, paragraph 9, has this to say about the appointment of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister:

The Nominating Officer of the largest party in the largest designation in the Assembly shall make a nomination to the Assembly Presiding Officer for the post of First Minister. The Nominating Officer of the largest party in the second largest designation in the Assembly shall similarly nominate for the post of Deputy First Minister.

This is translated into the legislation (section 8.1 of the Northern Ireland (St Andrews Agreement) Act 2006, which inserts a new Section 16A into the Northern Ireland Act 1998, if you are interested) as follows:

(4) The nominating officer of the largest political party of the largest political designation shall nominate a member of the Assembly to be the First Minister.
(5) The nominating officer of the largest political party of the second largest political designation shall nominate a member of the Assembly to be the deputy First Minister.

So in fact, if SF end up with 32 seats to the DUP’s 30, it doesn’t matter because if Unionist MLAs still outnumber Nationalist MLAs, the leader of the largest Unionist party in the Assembly still gets the top job.

The balance of Unionist v Nationalist MLAs in the Assembly has varied over the years as follows:

	1998	2003	2007
Unionists	58	59	55
Nationalists	42	42	44
Others	8	7	9

So, to pass the combined total of Unionist seats, Nationalists must make a net gain of six seats from Unionists in next year’s election, which is twice as many as the net advance of three which they made between 2003 and 2007 (and more than twice the net change from 1998 to 2007). I can see a couple coming out of the new boundaries, if the everything goes right for Nationalist parties, but I don’t see it being anywhere near enough to activate Section 16A.4 of the revised Northern Ireland Act on behalf of Martin McGuinness, or of any Nationalist politician, for some time to come.

Which makes me wonder what all the fuss has been about.

Edited to add: As Conal points out in comments, I have got this wrong. He draws my attention to the new Section 16C.6 of the 1998 Act as amended by Section 8 of the 2006 Act:

If at any time the party which is the largest political party of the largest political designation is not the largest political party—

(a) any nomination to be made at that time under section 16A(4) or 16B(4) shall instead be made by the nominating officer of the largest political party;

Which is pretty definitive that if SF get more seats than the DUP then Martin McGuinness gets to be First Minister.

I still don’t think it’s likely. SF could gain four seats on 2007 if the everything goes right (in FST, Upper Bann, Mid Ulster and East Antrim) but are pretty certain to lose one in Lagan Valley. But even if the DUP lose their most vulnerable seats (in Strangford, East Belfast, East Londonderry and South Down) they will still end up a tick ahead, 32 to 31. However I admit that it is a little less improbable than I had first thought.

i) births and deaths

22nd September 1944: birth of Fraser Hines, who played Jamie from 1966 to 1969, and has appeared in more Doctor Who episodes than anyone except the first four Doctors.

22nd September 1982: birth of Billie Piper, who played Rose in the first two series of New Who (2005-06) and reappeared in 2008 and 2010; has appeared in more New Who episodes than anyone except David Tennant.

ii) broadcast anniversaries

22nd September 1979: broadcast of fourth episode of Destiny of the Daleks. The Doctor defeats first the Movellans and then the Daleks, and Davros is captured and taken away for trial.

iii) date specified in canon

22nd September 1960: birth of Tegan Jovanka, as revealed in the 2006 Big Finish adventure The Gathering.

• the .doc file of J. Alfred Prufrock
  (tags: poetry funny)
• The new Unicode symbols
  Includes 1F63B, 'smiling cat face with heart-shaped eyes'
  (tags: alphabets)
• Elliott & McCrea – odds are that one of them will be elected « Slugger O'Toole
  Yet more UUP leadership commentary
  (tags: northernireland uup)
• A Pint of Unionist Lite: Paddy's still betting on Tom…
  More UUP leadership commentary
  (tags: northernireland uup)
• Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness: Is the UUP really set to become the Stumbling and Mumbling Party?
  UUP leadership election commentary (it's tomorrow)
  (tags: northernireland uup)
• The smart Dutch take on teen sex
  sane and sensible.
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender)
• Somalia's prime minister resigns – CNN.com
  As Dorothy Parker said on being told of the death of Calvin Coolidge, 'How can they tell?'
  (tags: somalia)
• : Making life harder for the bomb-makers
  …or rather, why the EU doesn't do that as well as perhaps it could
  (tags: eu waronterror)
• Tor.com: Happy Birthday Mario!
  (tags: sf games)

Thanks to my obsessive book-blogging and cross-referencing, I can reveal that these are the top ten books on LibraryThing by popularity which I have given two or fewer stars out of five:

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Twilight by Stefenie Meyer
Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

There are very few other books that I hate as much as I hate any on that list. (Though Doctor Who – The Twin Dilemma by Eric Saward is one.) Of the lot, I think the one that I hate far more than any other is the execrable Da Vinci Code. But my review of Angels and Demons is funnier.

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

broadcast anniversaries

21st September 1968: broadcast of second episode of The Mind Robber. Jamie turns into someone else with the same name; team Tardis meet Lemuel Gulliver and end up being charged by a unicorn.

21st September 1986: broadcast of third episode of Time and the Rani. Yet more running around with the Doctor ending up plugged into the machine which will drain his brain.

It is going to be tricky to answer questions like this otherwise than going on about The Lord of the Rings, which really is my favourite book ever but maybe is not such an interesting answer. One other book that I rate very highly is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which puts a very human face on a historical period of rapid social, political and technological change – it may seem odd to say this, but I find it in some ways a rather sfnal novel, dealing as it does with the social impact of new knowledge, if admittedly from a historical rather than futuristic perspective. It is years since I last read it, and we don’t seem to have a copy in the house, but that is easily remedied.

A couple of other books that blew me away: Mary Gentle’s Ash, with its amazing rewriting of the later Middle Ages (and I am sorry to say that I have not really enjoyed any of her other books); and on a completely different and more sombre note, the Lost Lives anthology of the lives and deaths of victims of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which I have not actually finished but which left a searing impression.

Day 01 – Your favourite series of books (with more than 3 in the series)
Day 02 – A book that you wish more people had read
Day 03 – Your favorite recent book
Day 04 – Your favorite book ever
Day 05 – A book you hate
Day 06 – Your favourite writer
Day 07 – A writer you don’t like
Day 08 – Your favourite work in translation
Day 09 – Best scene ever
Day 10 – A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving
Day 11 – A book that disappointed you
Day 12 – An book you’ve read more than twice
Day 13 – Favorite childhood book
Day 14 – Favorite male character
Day 15 – Favorite female character
Day 16 – Your guilty pleasure book
Day 17 – Favorite trilogy or tetralogy
Day 18 – Favorite book cover
Day 19 – Best ensemble of characters in a book
Day 20 – Favorite kiss or love scene
Day 21 – Favorite fictional romantic relationship
Day 22 – Favorite ending/climax
Day 23 – Most annoying character
Day 24 – Best quote
Day 25 – A book you plan on reading
Day 26 – OMG WTF? plot
Day 27 – Favourite non-mainstream writer
Day 28 – First book obsession
Day 29 – Current book obsession
Day 30 – Saddest character death

i)
births and deaths

20th September 1925: birth of John Wiles, innovative producer who succeeded
Verity Lambert but did not last long in 1965-66.

20th September 1969: birth of Mina Anwar who plays Rani’s mother Gita in the
Sarah Jane Adventures.

20th September 1986: death of Dennis Spooner, script editor in 1965 and
author of The Reign of Terror (1964), The Romans (1965),
The Time Meddler (1965), much of The Daleks’ Master Plan
(1965-6) and the first episode of The Power of the Daleks (1966).

20th September 2000: death of Mary Ridge, who directed Terminus
(1983)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

20th September 1975: broadcast of fourth episode of Terror of the
Zygons. The Doctor foils the Zygons’ attempt to attack London with the
Loch Ness Monster, and Harry stays behind on Earth.

20th September 1980: broadcast of fourth episode of The Leisure Hive.
Pangol attempts to create an army of dupicates of himself, but the Doctor
and Romana regress him to infancy, and depart.

20th September 1986: broadcast of third episode of The Mysterious
Planet (ToaTL #3). The Doctor and Peri continue being chased
around the mysterious planet, now revealed to be Earth.

20th September 1989: broadcast of the third episode of Battlefield.
The grand battle between UNIT and Mordred’s forces, though this turns out to
have been a diversion.

Another up-tick in the quality of the annuals; the stories are actually rather good, though confusingly six out of nine feature Jo Grant rather than Sarah Jane Smith who was now the established companion (and in those that do have Sarah, she is depicted as blonde). The best of the generally very literate stories is the second of the two comic strips, “After the Revolution”, with art by Edgar Hodges (though author of the text unknown), which has the revolutionary leader still in charge of the planet of Freedonia [sic] decades after he came to power as a bottled brain; just a little political, perhaps. Apart from the obvious fact that none of the illustratorts had ever seen Elisabeth Sladen, the art is generally rather good too, and the prose fillers a bit less silly than the previous year.

Copied verbatim from p. 55:

Dr Who and his team have many important decisions to make and problems to work out on their voyages through space and time. How good are you at working out problems that don’t always have a simple, obvious solution? Try these brain teasers:

1. The tide is rising. and you’re sitting in a ship in the harbour. A rope ladder hangs over the side of the boat, its ends just touching the water. If the rungs of the rope ladder are one foot apart, and the tide rises at the rate of eight inches an hour, how many of the rungs will be covered after four hours?

2. How much earth is there in a hole two feet by two feet by two feet?

3. You’ve cooked a tasty pie for dinner. and all you have to do now is to cut it into eight pieces for your eight guests [part of the question is omitted – the answer makes it clear that you are only allowed three cuts of the pie]. How?

4. How could Dr Who stand behind Sarah and Sarah stand behind Dr Who – at the same time?

5. There are three apples in a basket and three people in a room. How can you give an apple to each person and still have one in the basket?

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It’s been the year for reunions. Back in April I went to the 25-years-on reunion for Rathmore Grammar Schooledited to add see discussion of the late Peter Bowron below]; we’ve been better at keeping in touch; and it was not the first reunion we had had, so there was a bit more of an air of routine (though none the less welcome and enjoyable); and perhaps most important of all, the reunion was actually held in the college premises rather than in a function room four miles away. I thought that my college contemporaries had generally aged better than my school contemporarieshatred – so these pictures are not as good as I would have liked, but I think still presentable.

has a season ticket with Scudamore’s! I am fortunate in my choice of friends. So six of us set off for a quick excursion down memory lane the Cam in the morning.

Waiting on Clare Bridge for the season ticket to arrive, and admiring our surroundings.

Nick shows us how it is done.

Anne, Neal and James, sun in their eyes.

‘s turn, James and Nick at their ease.

I too had a go, and found the old skill came back, though it took more of a toll on my muscles than I realised at the time (shows how out of condition I am).

Again, I found it a very life-affirming experience to return to the college for a formal dinner (I had forgotten that it was supposed to be black tie, so was in normal business suit, but Clare is not a place that hugely cares about such things), hang about with old friends in the bar (the crypt, to be precise) until my energy dissipated about half past midnight (my wife managed to stay up much later than I did), and then a leisurely breakfast and more conversation on Saturday morning. We will try and be better at staying in touch in the ten years between this and the next reunion, promise.

Edited to add: poem by here.