In Xanadu, by Lavie Tidhar

Posted on 16 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third section:

‘Nila? Nila!’

A very short story submitted to the 2020 Hugo packet by Jonathan Strahan as part of his contribution for Best Editor, Short Form. A vivid vignette of a soldier defending her position, protecting exiled AI’s on Titan. I guess my only complaint is that it is very short indeed. It’s a pity that Tidhar has not written any more in this setting. (So far.) But you can get it here.

Monday reading

Posted on 15 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
The Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Robert Holmes, edited by John McElroy
Babel, by R.F. Kuang
Strawberry and the Soul Reapers, by Tite Kubo

Last books finished
The Dark Queens, by Shelley Puhak
Attack on Thebes, by M.D. Cooper (did not finish)
Blackpool Revisited, by John Collier
Vincent and the Doctor, by Paul Driscoll
Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne
Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang

Next books
Three Plays, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Terrance Dicks
The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach

Prague

Posted on 14 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Accommodation: Hotel Grand Majestic Plaza
Friday dinner: Kantýna, lots of protein
Saturday lunch: Malostranská beseda, hearty Czech fare
Saturday dinner: K – The Two Brothers, very decent Indian
Sunday coffee: Cafe Cafe, did the needful
Sunday lunch: Iveta Fabešova (Werichova vila), nutritious and not too heavy

A slightly belated wedding anniversary weekend in Prague, taking Friday off to explore the city. Just a few impressions:

Sadly, not allowed to take pictures of the tomb of Tycho Brahe.

Jan Hus getting burned at the stake, in the Bethlehem Chapel where he preached

The Church of St Nicholas, putting the “rock” into “Baroque”

A rather odd art installation in a cellar, dedicated to Kafka

The exhibition of children’s drawings from Terezín was heart-breaking.

Disturbing babies by David Černý at the Kampa Museum

Also in the Kampa Museum, impressive collection of art by Frantisek Kupka.

We would happily go back!

Books of 1974, 1924 and 1874

Posted on 13 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

It’s still January, and time to look at the books of 50, 100 and 150 years ago. I have identified the most popular books published in 1974, 1924 and 1874, and ranked them by the average of their Goodreads and LibraryThing ratings, taking the top 20, top 15 and top 10 respectively. This doesn’t say anything about literary merit, it’s just a metric of the books owned on the main online personal catalogue sites, and maybe an indication of staying power (or visibility in literature courses).The results are as follows:

	1974	LT	GR
1	Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein	13,524	1,373,526
2	Carrie, by Stephen King	14,250	700,238
3	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig	18,546	227,974
4	The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman	9,256	163,988
5	The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin	10,495	121,280
6	Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John le Carré	8,271	93,011
7	The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara	8,627	85,212
8	Helter Skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi	4,881	144,351
9	Jaws, by Peter Benchley	3,935	160,825
10	The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle	6,229	69,423
11	All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward	4,584	54,323
12	The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier	4,865	44,647
13	Alive, by Piers Paul Read	2,323	74,857
14	Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, by Philip K. Dick	4,218	40,542
15	Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard	5,370	26,755
16	Centennial, by James Michener	2,967	42,895
17	There’s a Wocket in my Pocket, by Dr. Seuss	3,708	33,724
18	Blubber, by Judy Blume	3,497	35,452
19	If Beale Street Could Talk, by James Baldwin	2,025	57,700
20	The Power Broker, by Robert Caro	2,813	20,806

To my surprise, I had never heard of Shel Silverstein or of his poetry collection for children which tops this particular poll. I guess he didn’t manage to cross the Atlantic (just the word “sidewalk” would be a barrier). If you don’t know the title poem, here it is:

There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we’ll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we’ll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.

The USA’s best-selling book of 1974 was Centennial, by James Michener, which has slipped to 16th place here.

All originally published in English; 19/20 by white folks; 17/20 by men; 6 non-fiction; 5 sf/horror; 5 adult fiction other than sf/horror (counting Jaws); 2 YA novels; Dr Seuss; and Silverstein (but it is top).

	1924	LT	GR
1	The Box-car Children, by Gertrude C. Warner	8,631	132,621
2	A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster	12,254	79,260
3	We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin	8,265	94,910
4	The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann	9,414	48,315
5	The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie	3,424	109,435
6	Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, by Pablo Neruda	3,083	70,399
7	Poirot Investigates, by Agatha Christie	3,417	62,649
8	When We Were Very Young, by A. A. Milne	5,389	25,479
9	Billy Budd, by Herman Melville	1,967	17,637
10	The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany	2,244	7,569
11	So Big, by Edna Ferber	973	10,607
12	A Hunger Artist, by Franz Kafka	388	17,659
13	Naomi, by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki	937	7,071
14	Skylark, by Dezső Kosztolányi	597	2,783
15	The Three Hostages, by John Buchan	551	1,161

Again, I had not heard of the top book on this list, and again it’s an American children’s classic, the first in a long series.

I had some tricky boundary cases here. In the end I disqualified The Collected Emily Dickinson (material not first published in 1924) and “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell (not a book), and I decided that most people mean Hemingway’s 1925 volume In Our Time rather than the different and shorter 1924 collection with the same title. I allowed Billy Budd, even though it was first published in 1924 as part of a volume of Melville’s collected writings, because it has a long subsequent history of standalone publishing. (Melville had died in 1891, a third of a century earlier.)

The USA’s top-selling book of 1924 in 1924 was Edna Ferber’s So Big, in 1th place here.

9/15 written in English, two in German, one each in Spanish, Japanese, Hungarian and Russian. NB that We was first published in English translation; the Russian original was not published until 1952.

14/15 by white folks; 11/15 by men (two books by Agatha Christie, two by other women).

8 adult non-sf novels, 2 sf/fantasy, 2 children’s books, 2 short fiction collections and one poetry collection.

	1874
1	Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy	11,152	151,007
2	The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne (1874-75 serialisation)	4,661	53,410
3	The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope (1874-75 serialisation)	2,802	13,156
4	Ninety-Three, by Victor Hugo	1,118	5,591
5	The Temptation of Saint Anthony, by Gustave Flaubert	938	2,995
6	Pepita Jiménez, by Juan Valera	506	2,198
7	The Three-cornered Hat, by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón	443	1,642
8	The Conquest of Plassans, by Émile Zola	368	1,812
9	The Hand and the Glove, by Machado de Assis	170	1,538
10	Zaragoza, by Benito Pérez Galdós	76	530

This time I have indeed heard of the top book on the list; indeed, it’s the only one of them that I have read. There’s also a clear ranking in that LT and GR both agree on the top six and what order they come in.

Again, some boundary cases. Phineas Redux and Lady Anna, both by Anthony Trollope, were serialised from 1873-74 so I count them in the earlier year. The great Australian novel For the Term of His Natural Life, by Marcus Clarke, was serialised in 1870-72. Middlemarch was first published in a single volume in 1874, but it had been out for some time.

10/10 by men (top books from this year by women are Johnny Ludlow, by Ellen Wood, and Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803, by Dorothy Wordsworth, who had died in 1855). 9/10 by white folks (Machado de Assis was the grandson of slaves).

You could count The Mysterious Island as sf, but the others are all mundane novels.

4 in French, 3 in Spanish, 2 in English, 1 in Portuguese.

So, perhaps a little reading project there, once the Hugos are over.

Lunar Descent, by Allen Steele

Posted on 12 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Two strokes of lightning split the black night sky above Boston simultaneously. One hit somewhere in Dorchester, in the no-man’s-land where even the street gangs had fled from the thunderbolts and the cold, driving rain, taking shelter in the doorways of barricaded stores and housing projects; the other was its reflection, mirrored in the titanic glass wall of the Sony Tower, rising three hundred stories above the uptown streets, a black megalith that dwarfed the architectural Brahmins of yesteryear, the Hancock Building and the Pru.

This is the first novel by Allen Steele that I have read in full – I read the two sections of Coyote that were Hugo finalists, but never sat down to read the full thing. I confess that I got it purely because it is set in 2024, 33 years after the publication date of 1991. The world is not so different from the present day except that there is a functioning lunar industrial colony, churning out special components for Earth’s booming electronics industry. The colony is badly run, and our protagonist, a disgraced former astronaut with addiction problems, is sent to sort things out. He is joined by a tough female NASA security agent and a hacking genius who specialises in undetectable electronic crime. It’s rather a good romp, inevitably reminiscent of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but from a rather more obviously left-wing point of view (and I’m not saying that is a bad thing). You can get it here.

Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson

Posted on 11 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

It seemed to me that the changes that have occurred to the landscape in Britain are so profound that, even in the relatively unspoiled fragments of habitat, perhaps all that remains is a pale shadow of their former natural glory. It is hard to know for sure. Without a time machine, we can never really know what it would have been like to be a naturalist rambling through the British countryside in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, other than by reading their books and notes. We might infer from the fact that there are old recipes for cowslip wine – which require as the first step the collecting of two buckets full of cowslip flowers – that they were once much more common than they are now, but we can’t know how common, or how abundant the bees were that visited them, or how numerous the worms that burrowed beneath their roots. This said, it occurred to me that there might be a way of gaining an insight into what Britain used to be like – by going to Eastern Europe. I had heard that in parts of Eastern Europe agricultural systems remained little changed, having escaped the drive for increased yield that afflicted Britain from the Second World War onwards, and which was subsequently driven throughout Western Europe by the Common Agricultural Policy’s labyrinthine and often perverse system of subsidies for farm ‘improvement’.

A heartfelt and passionate book about bumble bees, and how the destruction of the traditional landscape in the name of agricultural productivity has made us all poorer. Goulson is dedicated to the study of bees, and goes all over the world to find them (there’s a particularly vivid section in Argentina). He conveys well the frustrations of research on small, fragile and often hostile invertebrates, and the grim situation of species disappearing from the face of the planet before they have been recorded. Now that he mentions it, isn’t it weird that bats are strongly protected by the law when other animals (less cute perhaps) are not? This is an eloquent call for more thought about and care of our natural heritage, and you can get it here.

I’m glad to say that we have a wildlife-friendly garden here, and we do see bumble bees buzzing around in the summer. I’ll take a closer look this year.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017, and the non-fiction book which had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on both of those piles, and last in my 2017 intake, is Rule of Law by Glynis Breitenbach; one more to go before that.

A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell

Posted on 10 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Marcin had been yelling questions at her, only about half of them in English. What were they running from? It hurt! He got to the point of actually fighting her off, and so, finally, she’d been forced to drop him. Now here they were, on a slight rise among some close trees, which Autumn hoped might give her some idea of when the thing approached. Marcin was lying on the ground screaming insults at her in Polish, and she was looking around, trying to watch out of the corner of her eyes. Which was really pretty bloody difficult. It kept making you want to just keep turning your head.

Third in the series of Lychford books by Paul Cornell, this is a rare case of a fantasy novel addressing Brexit. The magical women of Lychford are dealing with the internal consequences of the referendum, prejudice against foreigners and people of colour, and at the same time an eruption of danger from the much older inhabitants of their space. I see a lot of Lychford fans were not wowed by it, but I found it a thoughtful reflection on difficult political circumstances. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that list is The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati, by Philip Purser-Hallard

Posted on 9 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I was lucky enough to watch this episode at Gallifrey One in 2020, and wrote then:

I’ll always remember The Haunting of Villa Diodati for the circumstances in which I first saw it, packed into the biggest hall in the Los Angeles airport Marriott with a thousand other fans, whose reactions were so voluble (and positive) that I needed to watch it again when I got home. It’s not the first Who story with Mary Shelley and a Cyberman, which is a really obvious pairing. But it looked good, sounded good, and more or less made sense both times I watched it. See John Connors here and Darren Mooney here.

Rewatching again for this post, I wasn’t quite so sure if it all made sense; it felt like there was a lot of act-ING and not a lot of character development, and the plot was a fairly standard alien intrusion tale. But perhaps that’s because my standards had been raised by the return of RTD and the Fourteenth Doctor (I was watching in the middle of last month, before the Christmas episode). Anyway, it still evokes happy memories of February 2020, just before the world changed.

Philip Purser-Hallard has produced a longish Black Archive on the story, and I am not sure if it is entirely to the point. The introduction says that the themes he will look at are darkness and light, the Frankenstein story and parenthood.

The first chapter, “‘This Night, June 1816′” looks at other fictional treatments of the writing of Frankenstein, and other historical Doctor Who stories. Purser-Hallard makes the interesting point that “The Haunting of Villa Diodati is unique in Doctor Who to date, in that every speaking (or crying) character who does not also appear in other episodes is based on a historical person”.

The second and longest chapter, “‘I Detest All Gossip, You Understand'”, looks in considerable detail at the family backgrounds of every single historical character in the story. It is here where I became uneasy; a Doctor Who episode is not a history lesson, it is an entertainment, and it seems to me a categorical error to grade THoVD against historical accuracy, especially since we know that it consciously diverges (in that the Frankenstein story is not actually written by Mary Shelly “on time”).

The third and shortest chapter, “‘Save the Poet, Save the Universe'”, looks at the use of Percy Shelley’s poetry in the episode to characterise Ashad the Cyberman, and Byron’s to characterise the Doctor. Its second paragraph is:

Many of Percy’s poems were profoundly political, and have been taken as inspiration by radical movements from the Chartists to the Arab Spring, by way of Tiananmen Square². Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the UK’s opposition at the time of the episode’s writing, filming and broadcast, was fond of quoting his response to the Peterloo Massacre, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (written in 1819 but not published until 1832) at Labour Party rallies, and the line ‘Ye are many, they are few’ was credited with inspiring the party’s 2017 election slogan, ‘For the many, not the few’³. While it might be extreme to state, as the Doctor goes on to, that Ryan, Yaz and Graham ‘will not exist’ if Percy’s writings after June 1816 are erased from history, their world would indeed be detectably different if they were. As she insists, ‘Words matter.”
² Mulhallen, Jacqueline, ‘For the Many, Not the Few: Jeremy Corbyn and Percy Bysshe Shelley’.
³ Londoner, The, ‘Londoner’s Diary: Jeremy Corbyn’s Romantic Notions Traced Back to Percy Shelley’; Shelley P, Selected Poems and Prose, p368.

The fourth chapter, “‘Something to Awaken Thrilling Horror'”, looks at the Gothic in Doctor Who. invoking Buffy and several previous Black Archives.

The fifth chapter, “‘That Writing Thing'”, looks at the parallels between Ashad and the monster in Frankenstein, and tries to illuminate this with the concepts of creation and parenthood.

The sixth and last chapter, “‘This World Doesn’t End in 1816′”, looks at darkness, light and the apocalypse in this story and in Chibnall-era Doctor Who.

Appendices illustrate the family trees of the Byrons, Godwin and Shelleys, and the historical timeline of events.

It will be apparent that I didn’t get as much out of this Black Archive as I have from some in the series. I don’t feel that the story can quite bear the analytical weight that is placed on it here, and I’m not comfortable with an interpretation that suggests that a deep knowledge of the shifting relationships in the Byron/Shelley/Clairmont household is necessary for a full appreciation of the story. But others may find it more useful. You can get it here.

Monday reading

Posted on 8 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

A new year, and a new day for my weekly roundup – and in fact I will shift to Tuesdays from March.

Current
Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne
Blackpool Revisited, by John Collier

Last books finished
The Future, by Naomi Alderman
A Fairytale Life, by Lilah Sturges et al
Fatal Path, by Ronan Fanning
Rule of Law: A Memoir, by Glynnis Breytenbach
The Beautifull Cassandra, by Jane Austen
Anthro-Vision, by Gillian Tett

Next books
Attack on Thebes, by M.D. Cooper
Vincent and the Doctor, by Paul Driscoll
Strawberry and the Soul Reapers, by Tite Kubo

Jim Bennett, 1947-2023

Posted on 7 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I don’t intend for this blog to become a stream of obituaries, but I have just learned that Jim Bennett died last October. He was my supervisor and mentor for my Cambridge MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science, and helped me over the intellectual hurdle into the humanities; in fact he probably gave me some of the best advice on writing I have ever received. He recommended me to Peter Bowler for the Belfast research assistantship which became my PhD, and was then the external examiner who gave me that PhD several years later.

He was tough but fair as a teacher. I remember a couple of teaching moments with him vividly: his class on how to use an astrolabe was masterfully clear, and postgraduate seminars featured Babbage’s original notes for the Difference Engine, and a 17th-century prism “as would have been used by Newton” which, as he eventually revealed, was in fact the actual prism that had been used by Newton. My career took a very different path in the end, but I will always be grateful for the early encouragement that he offered at the point that I seemed to be heading down an academic track.

Here he is in 2010, with his gentle Belfast accent, introducing the Oxford Mueum of the History of Science, which he moved to in 1994. He had cropped the Einstein-like shock of hair that I remember him having in Cambridge.

Thanks, Jim.

The 95 Best Picture Oscar winners: some statistics

Posted on 6 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

So, I have now watched all 95 winners of the Best Picture Oscar. My preferences are clear, but I thought I might do a bit of comparison between them all.

Sources

28 (29.5%) are original stories written for the film, with little bearing on any other source. The first of these was the very first winner, Wings, and the last the most recent, Everything Everywhere All at Once. The one I liked most was An American in Paris, and the one I liked least (indeed, least of all the Oscar-winning films) was Platoon.

14 (14.7%) are based on earlier dramatic treatments, whether for the stage (all but two), television (once, Marty) or a direct remake of an earlier film (also once, CODA). The first of these was Cavalcade and the most recent CODA. I liked Casablanca the most – it’s my top Oscar-winning film overall – and Cavalcade the least. (I’m counting The Sound of Music, A Man for All Seasons and Oliver! here, because although the first two are based on history and the third on a novel, the films are directly adaptations of the stage plays.)

38 (40.0%) are adapted from written fiction – mostly novels, short fiction in five cases, and two epic poems (the sources of The Best Years of Our Lives and Braveheart). The first of these was All Quiet on the Western Front and the latest Slumdog Millionaire. I liked Schindler’s List most and Cimarron least.

Finally, 15 (15.8%) are filmic treatments of real events. The boundary is a little blurry here, but I am counting all dramatic treatments of non-fiction books which did not go through stage treatment, and also Spotlight and Green Book, which are dramatisations of real-life events The first was The Life of Emile Zola, and the most recent was Nomadland (which I am counting because although the film is clearly fictional, the book of the same name that it is based on is clearly not). Of these I liked The King’s Speech the most and Argo the least.

Time of setting

The punctuation points of history here are the two World Wars, and to a certain extent the Vietnam war and the turn of the millennium.

18 (18.9%) are clearly set entirely before the first world war. Two of those films are set during the US Civil War (Gone with the Wind and Dances with Wolves). To those 18 I would add My Fair Lady, because the King is clearly Edward VII, but not How Green Was My Valley – although the book is set in the late nineteenth century, the film feels more mid-twentieth.

Three (3.2%) are largely set during the First World War – Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front and Lawrence of Arabia – and several others straddle the war with more or less attention given to it: Cavalcade, Cimarron, The Last Emperor, Gandhi, The Great Ziegfeld..

13 (13.7%) are set between the wars, including How Green Was My Valley, for reasons given above, also Rebecca, which is based on a book published in 1938, and The Lost Weekend which is based on a novel set in 1936. This doesn’t count Cavalcade, Cimarron and The Great Ziegfeld, which all conclude in this period, or The Last Emperor and Gandhi, which continue. I guess I should also count half of The Godfather, Part II.

Roughly equal numbers are set before and after the Second World War. Seven (7.4%) are set in the Second World War directly. I would add Going My Way, which doesn’t mention the war but is clearly contemporary, and The Best Years of Our Lives, set in the immediate aftermath. Again, The Last Emperor and Gandhi continue through this period.

15 (15.8%) are largely set between the Second World War and the Vietnam War; also the chronologically later half of The Godfather, Part II. The Last Emperor and Gandhi also conclude during this period. Most of these are datable to a precise year.

Only three (3.2%) actually feature the Vietnam War, The Deer Hunter, Platoon and Forrest Gump, but of course it looms over the rest.

Another 12 (12.6%) are set in the last third of the twentieth century, and 13 (13.7%) are set in the twenty-first century. And The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is set in a different Age entirely.

36 (37.9%) are set in more or less the present day, at the time of making. Another eight (8.4%) are set in identifiably the last decade (plus Cimarron and Cavalcade which both have most of the action earlier but end almost in the present day). Eleven (11.6%) are set between a decade and a quarter-century in the past (counting How Green Was My Valley, and stretching a a bit for Patton in 1970). Ten (10.5%) are set between a quarter-century and a half century before they were made, fourteen (14.7%) between a half century and a century before. There’s a jump between the 85 years of Titanic (1912-1997) and the 112 years if Unforgiven (1880-1992). Then there’s a steady progression to Ben-Hur (33 AD-1959). I find that I rate the contemporary settings slightly higher on average than the historicals.

Place of setting

It will not astonish you to learn that a clear majority of the Oscar-winners, 54 (56.8%) are set entirely or largely in the United States. Of those, 19 (20% of all winners, 35% of American ones) are set in New York and New Jersey, plus the start and end of Green Book and the end of It Happened One Night.

Another four and a half are set elsewhere in the North-East (Spotlight, The Departed and CODA in Massachusetts, and Rocky and half of The Deer Hunter in Pennsylvania). Still in the neighbourhood, The Shape of Water and much of The Silence of the Lambs are set in Maryland.

Ten (10.5%) are set broadly in the West; five in California, one each in Oregon (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Wyoming (Unforgiven), Colorado (Dances with Wolves), Oklahoma (Cimarron) and on the open road (Nomadland). You could add a large part of Rain Man as well.

Nine (9.5%) are set in the South, counting The Greatest Show on Earth whose location is not specified but was filmed in Florida. Georgia is the most popular Southern state (Gone with the Wind, Driving Miss Daisy, part of Moonlight), followed by Texas (Terms of Endearment, No Country for Old Men) with Louisiana (12 Years a Slave), Mississippi (In the Heat of the Night) and a fictional state (All the President’s Men) all represented.

Of the major regions, the Midwest is least prominent with four and a half – the start of Rain Man, also The Best Years of Our Lives, The Sting, Ordinary People and, indeed, Chicago. Forrest Gump roams all over Lower 48 (as well as Vietnam). And then there’s Hawaii, with From Here to Eternity.

25 out of 95 are set in Europe. Nine of those are set entirely in England, and another two partly there (Chariots of Fire and Patton). Five are set in France, plus the other parts of Chariots of Fire and more parts of Patton. Two are set in Austria, with one each for Denmark (Hamlet), Germany (Grand Hotel), Poland (Schindler’s List), Scotland (Braveheart) and Wales (How Green Was My Valley), with maybe one and a half for Italy (Gladiator and parts of Patton and The English Patient).

Counting the films set in Asia is a bit blurry. As mentioned already, The Deer Hunter, Platoon and Forrest Gump all feature the Vietnam war. Moving east to west, Parasite is in Korea, The Last Emperor in China, The Bridge on the River Kwai in Myanmar, Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire in India; and if we can include the Middle East, there’s Argo in Iran, The Hurt Locker in Iraq, Lawrence of Arabia in, er, Arabia and Ben-Hur in Palestine. That’s twelve-ish.

Two and a bit are in Africa – Out of Africa, Casablanca and parts of The English Patient.

That leaves one in the Pacific Ocean (Mutiny on the Bounty), one in the Atlantic (Titanic), one Around the World in Eighty Days, and one in Middle Earth.

So, the representative Oscar-winning film is adapted from written fiction, set in the USA (probably New York), around the time of the Second World War, set not in the present day but a couple of years earlier. That actually fits The Lost Weekend rather well; I ranked it 42nd of the 95 winners, very close to the middle, and I think it probably is a fairly good taster for the project of watching all of the Oscar winners. Not that I am necessarily recommending that as a course of action.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Into the Unknown, eds. Laura Clarke and Patrick Gyger

Posted on 5 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter (“Children of Utopia”, by Andy Sawyer):

In science fiction, [Thomas] More’s island becomes another planet whose inhabitants are rewritten as aliens from other worlds; his criticism more secular in imagining a possible, if not probable, future. Although More did not invent the concept of the better world – isolated, ‘perfect’ societies are found in Chinese fables such as the 5th century Peach Blossom Spring, or the medieval European Land of Cockaigne where all material pleasures can be found – he gave us a word to articulate this concept. ‘Utopia’ means good place, but the pun in More’s Greek tells us that it means no place¹. It exists in our imagination. Should we try and create it? Politicians and science fiction writers alike, being what they are, often end up creating a ‘bad place’: dystopia. The best science fiction addresses this tension: our desires for something different and better compete with fears of something much, much worse.
¹ More’s invention of the word ‘Utopia’ is based on the Greek ou ‘not’+ typos ‘place’.

This is the souvenir book of an exhibition about science fiction in the Barbican in London which I went to in June 2017, and don’t seem to have written up at the time. It’s a really wonderful collection of sf art, mainly book covers with some magazine covers, comics and stills from films or TV, combined with some decent essays by the likes of Andy Sawyer, Tade Thompson, Susan Stepney and Bruce Sterling. I particularly appreciated the piece on Soviet science fiction by Alyona Sokolnikova. I’m afraid it is out of print, so no purchase link today.

Here’s a walkthrough of the exhibition in case you missed it:

I remember that at the exhibition itself I was particularly grabbed by Palestinian film-maker Larissa Sansour’s In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, which explores the intersection between sf, archaeology and politics, three subjects that greatly interest me. The full film (30 mins) is here, and this is a trailer:

This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is iLobby.eu, by Caroline de Cock.

Joan Urquhart, 1916-2023

Posted on 4 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

On Christmas Day we lost my great-aunt, Joan Urquhart, who was born in Dublin in 1916 when it was still under British rule, and had an adventurous life. We had a big family gathering today to say goodbye to her in Bangor, Co Down, where she had lived for the last four decades. Coincidentally, today would have been the 104th birthday of her younger brother, who we lost in 2006.

The local newspaper ran a feature on her 107th birthday last June, reporting her reliance on the Guardian crossword to keep her mind active.

JOAN’S SECRET TO A LONG LIFE

Her father, my great-grandfather, was one of the civil servants who transferred to the new Northern Ireland government when it was created in 1922. He also had a sideline in the performing arts, and Joan followed him into the new-fangled world of radio plays. Here is the Radio Times notice of her first appearance, in a show which was broadcast (probably live) on 26 January 1934, when she would have been 17. (I have checked with the BBC archives and sadly none of her performances survive.)

After school she trained as a domestic science / home economics teacher; married a Scottish soldier, Hamilton Urquhart; served with British forces in Italy in the Second World War; followed Hamilton to Germany and Cyprus (where her four children had to be brought to school under armed guard, during the EOKA uprising); and came back to Northern Ireland, where for much of my childhood her house was in the same block as ours with adjoining back gardens, so we saw a lot of her. Her sister, my grandmother, died twenty years before I was born, so she (and her mother, who lived to the age of 98) filled that gap to an extent.

The first photograph including both her and me was taken at my christening in 1967; she’s on the right in the blue hat. I’m sorry to say that the only people in the picture still living are me, my mother (behind me, no hat) and my second youngest aunt, in the pink dress (also no hat).

At this point she was an activist in the tourism sector; here she is trying to sell “Friendly Northern Ireland” to the Dutch in 1974. (A tough sell at the time, I suspect.)

She eventually moved to Bangor, where she ran a bed and breakfast until she was in her mid 80s. She and I did our German O-Levels on the same day, when I was 16 and she was 67; we both got A’s. (“Luckily,” as someone else said.) Two years later she did a French A-Level and got an A again. Twenty years later she did a German A-level, in her late 80s. Young F got to know her too; here he is on her 90th birthday, when he was not quite seven.

She was sharp, optimistic and humorous, and regaled us with anecdotes at her hundredth birthday party:

My first job was at a boarding school in Purley, in Surrey.
I had a strange incident there.
We used to go up to London to see the sights occasionally.
And I was waiting for somebody at the Piccadilly Hotel.
And she was late. I think she was Irish!
I got a bit fed up and started walking up and down the footpath.
And suddenly this young woman tapped me on the shoulder,
and she hissed in my ear, “Sister! Get off my beat!”
That was my first introduction to the seamy side.

Joan had four children, but no grandchildren; sadly her oldest daughter, on the left in the picture taken on her 100th birthday in 2016, predeceased her, but the others were able to spend time with her at the end.

F and I saw her last August, and she was in good form. But it was clear that her spirit was gently taking leave of her body, and I knew we would probably not see her again.

A lot of us gathered today to say goodbye to her, and a lot more were there in spirit. She touched many people’s lives for the better, and I am glad that I knew her. My thoughts are especially with her three children today and going forward.

Me with my mother, my son, three aunts, two uncles, three first cousins, seven first cousins once removed including Joan’s two living daughters, a second cousin and a couple of other halves.

Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout

Posted on 3 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame of third chapter:

An apartment block. A man is looking down from the roof at the outline of a human figure drawn outside the front door.

First published in 2009, this picked up the hat-trick of the three major prizes for comics in the Dutch-speaking world, the Bronze Adhemar, the Stripschapprijs and the Pix St-Michel (Dutch category). It’s an intense and moving portrait of a man coming to terms with his son’s suicide; his struggles with his marriage, his work, therapy, drugs, and his fantasies about his son’s survival.

Linthout has now expanded the original edition with two extra chapters (for a total of ten), and my hardcover copy also includes, as an appendix, an interview with the author and his therapist. One of the new chapters very consciously erodes the barriers between protagonist and author (they were slim anyway). It’s a gruelling read in places, but also has shafts of grim humour (there’s a particularly poignant scene around a book launch). Really recommended. You can get it here.

An Atlas of Irish History, by Ruth Dudley Edwards; and in search of W.H. Bromage

Posted on 2 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

The major engagements of the medieval period are. however, those of defenders against invaders. Most of them were fought in an attempt to prevent further Norman penetration of the country. The fact that the Irish succeeded in preventing the Normans from completely overrunning the country was due not only to their stout resistance, but also to the isolation of the invaders from their homeland and the impossibility of gaining sufficient reinforcements to maintain and consolidate their position. Additionally, the importation by the Irish of Scots mercenary soldiers called gallowglas (from gall óglach – foreign warrior) from the thirteenth century onwards, was to strengthen their resistance considerably. At first confined to Ulster, galloglas later spread throughout Ireland in the service of the great families. These mercenaries prolonged the life of the independent Gaelic kingdoms for more than two centuries after the defeat of Edward Bruce (14). Four centuries after the conquest the O’Neills and O’Donnells were still ruling most of Ulster according to the customs of their ancestors. It was not until their defeat in the Nine Years War (15) in 1603, that all of Gaelic Ireland finally fell to the invaders.

Here are the two maps, by W.H. Bromage, referred to above. I will have a lot more to say about the artist below.

I have known Ruth Dudley Edwards since 1989 or so; she was at school with one of my aunts, as it turns out, and her father was the historian Robin Dudley Edwards. I regret to say that I have stopped following her on social media; she is entitled to express her hardline conservative views, but I do not feel compelled to read them.

This book dates from half a century ago, when the world was a different place and Irish history was a different discipline. It’s a breezy summary of the main points of Irish history to date, concentrating on the medieval and early modern periods, and the maps, even though they would have been a bit old-fashioned even in 1973, illustrate the narrative.

But there are some odd omissions. After independence, Northern Ireland largely disappears from the narrative. (It gets seven pages in the second last chapter, and the Troubles get one line.) From my political perspective, it would have been interesting to see more mapping of election results across the whole period. The chapter on social change completely misses the elephant in the room, the role of the Catholic church in society.

There is a much newer edition, published in 2005 with contributions from Bridget Hourican, where I believe that these issues have all been addressed. I see reviewers complaining, however, that Bromage’s maps were retained despite not really being with the Zeitgeist; as I said, they look old-fashioned for 1973, let alone 2005 (or 2024). But you can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson.

W.H. Bromage, who drew the maps, is credited with the illustrations for a number of similar books of the period, mostly published by Methuen, some by pretty big names: The Archaeology of Crete: an Introduction, by John D. Pendlebury (1939); The War in Burma, by Roy McKelvie (1948); Introducing Spain, by Cedric Salter (1954); In Search of London, by H.V. Morton (1956); An Atlas of World Affairs, by Andrew Boyd (1957); Frontiers and Wars, by Winston S. Churchill (1962); Pan-Africanism, by Colin Legum (1962); Survey of the Moon, by Patrick Moore (1963); The Sword-Bearers: Supreme Command in the First World War, by Corelli Barnett (1963); The American West, by John A. Hawgood (1967); An Atlas of African Affairs, by Andrew Boyd and Patrick van Rensburg (1970); and The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers, by George MacDonald Fraser (1971). An Atlas of Irish History (1973) is the last book that I have found which credits him.

Roy McKelvie, writing in 1948, describes him as “Mr W.H. Bromage of the News Chronicle“. I’ve found a number of maps of the changing front lines of WW2 published by the News Chronicle and credited to “William Bromage”…

…and also a rather nice illustrated text of the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child, signed by Eisenhower, Montgomery and Churchill and dated 1945.

A William Bromage is also credited with the maps in Small Boat Through France (1964) and Small Boat on the Thames (1966), both by Roger Pilkington. This must be the same person. That’s literally the only other certain information I have about him. Illustrating fourteen books in 34 years would hardly make you a living, so he must have been full-time with the News Chronicle until it was absorbed by the Daily Mail in 1960, and maybe stayed on after that.

Ancestry.com gives me half a dozen people called W.H. Bromage, with the W.H. short for “William Henry” in all cases, born in England in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The surname is concentrated in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. He could, of course, easily have been born somewhere else entirely. I find a Detroit journalist of that name in the 1920s and 1930s, who could conceivably be the same person though it’s a bit of a shift. I also find a San Francisco journalist of the same name in the 1890s, and a reference in 1919 to “the renowned Anglo-Catholic artist, W.H. Bromage”, but neither of these can have been illustrating An Atlas of Irish History in 1973.

It is frustrating that I know almost nothing else about Bromage: he was clearly a man of talent, who captured the market in drawing maps for books about history and current affairs. It could be that this is a problem of Internet research, and that if I had access to a decent reference library in the UK I would find his biographical details really quickly. Or not; you never know what will survive.

2024, according to Science Fiction

Posted on 1 January 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

As in previous years, I’ve searched for SF set in the year to come so that we will be forewarned of what lies in wait for us. (This has not always proved to be an accurate guide: cf 2020.) This is a relatively thin year, to be honest, but I have a dozen or so film, TV, books and a video game, all set in the year 2024. Here is my complete compilation:

I should add that I have a cutoff of twenty years earlier, so I’m not counting anything released or published since 2004 here. This does lead to a couple of gaps…

Most notoriously, Star Trek: The Next Generation predicted Irish reunification in 2024, in the episode “The High Ground”. The scene was cut when the story was first shown on British TV, and the whole episode was skipped when the series was first shown on Irish TV.

Anyway, chronologically the first is Beyond the Time Barrier, a 1960 film produced by and starring Robert Clarke, a USAF test pilot who discovers that he has flown into a dystopian future, the year 2024, where a cosmic plague has devastated humanity and the sterile remnants cower underground. Our hero is asked to breed with the only young woman who remains fertile. I will leave it to your imagination to guess what happens next.

In a 1964 episode of TV show The Outer Limits “The Invisible Enemy”, the first humans to land on Mars in 2021 mysteriously disappear; three years later, a rescue mission captained by Adam West (better known as Batman) comes to investigate and finds a breathable atmosphere and sand monsters.

Harlan Ellison’s notorious dystopia, A Boy and his Dog (novella 1969, film 1975) is definitely set in 2024 – the original novella says that it is 76 years after 1948, and the film bigs up the date in promotional posters, indeed 2024 is part of the title in some translations. Again our protagonist is invited to breed with one of the few remaining fertile women after the apocalypse; she does not get a happy ending.

Norman Macrae, the deputy chief editor of the Economist, published The 2024 Report: A Concise History of the Future, 1974-2024 in 1984. (And seems to have produced a revised edition called The 2025 Report the following year; see here.) He forecast the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Communism in the late 1980s, an a boom in technology leading to the withering away of the state and a new era of enlightened discourse. If only. (You can get it here, at a price.

Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) is set in 2024; yet another dystopia in which humanity has screwed up the atmosphere and our hero needs to put things right. It is the sequel to a much better film from five years earlier. As someone very wise once put it, there should have been only one!

Also from 1991, in Allen Steele’s novel Lunar Descent the workers on an industrial colony on the Moon go on strike to hit back at management. Like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but more genuinely left-wing. You can get it here.

And again from 1991, the anime Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture is mainly set in 2028 but starts with a flashback to 2024 where the policewoman hero first encounters the monster at the core of the plot.

Octavia E. Butler’s classic Parable of the Sower (1993) is, I’m afraid, yet another dystopia where society is collapsing due to climate change and growing inequality. Butler’s teenage protagonist revives her community through a new religion. The story starts in 2024. The graphic novel version won the Hugo in 2021. (You can get the novel here and the graphic version here.)

In 1995, Star Trek Deep Space Nine visited 2024 California in the two-part story “Past Tense”. It turns out that the time-slipped crew have arrived on the eve of historically notorious riots in a deeply divided society. (Incidentally although I’m enjoying Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard, also set in California in 2024, it fails my twenty-years-ago threshold.)

In 2001, the cartoonist Ted Hall published 2024, a graphic novel updating Orwell’s 1984. The economy is run by megacorporations that exploit ethnic tensions in trade wars; the protagonists are named Winston and Julia; news and history are easily revised digitally, and shopping and pornography substitute for social interaction and passion. (According to the review in Publishers Weekly.) You can get it here.

I promised a game, and here it is: Jet Set Radio Future, made by Sega for the Xbox in 2002, features kids with rocket-powered rolling skates zooming around Tokyo.

We’ve had Star Trek twice, and I’m glad to say that we can also have some Doctor Who. Last chronologically before my 20-year cutoff. The Eighth Doctor novel Emotional Chemistry by Simon A. Forward takes place in three timelines: 1812, the 21st century and the 51st century. The back cover makes it clear that the 21st century action is set in 2024, mostly in Russia. You can get it here (at a price).

Finally, and more optimistically, the protagonist of the 1999 film The Thirteenth Floor, having endured awful scenarios in virtual versions of 1999 and 1937, wakes up to discover that it’s 2024 and actually everything is OK.

Dystopias and more positive high-tech futures are finely balanced here – I count six of each, with maybe an extra dystopia if we are allowed to take the two versions of A Boy and his Dog separately. It could go either way, folks; let’s be careful this year!

2023 books in review

Posted on 31 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

I read 351 books this year, the second highest of the twenty years that I have been keeping count. (The highest was 2008, when I read all of the Doctor Who novelisations and most of Shakespeare.) My page count was 86,900, which is only 6th out of 20, though the highest since 2014. Both tallies include a fair number of Clarke Award submissions which I ruthlessly set aside at the 50 page mark. I’ve also been reading some shorter books, notably Doctor Who comics and the Black Archives.

148 (42%) of those book were by non-male writers, which is a record in both cases (this year’s 42.2% is a smidgen above 2021’s 41.9%). 42 were by non-white writers, which is joint equal with 2021’s record, though the percentage (12%) is lower than three of the last four years.

Science Fiction

164 (47%) of these books were SF, not counting Doctor Who novels. That’s the highest number in 20 years, and the highest percentage since 2005.

Top sf books of the year:
I’m really proud of the Arthur C. Clarke shortlist:
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman (Review; get it here)
The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift (Review; get it here)
The Anomaly by Hervé le Tellier (Review; get it here)
Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick (Review; get it here)
Metronome by Tom Watson (Review; get it here)
The Red Scholar’s Wake by Aliette de Bodard (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo; a re-telling of The Great Gatsby with a queer fantasy twist. (Review; get it here)
All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva; tremendous collection of short stories. (Review; get it here)

Welcome rereads:
Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones; first in the Dalemark Quartet series of YA fantasy novels, a very moral but exciting tale. (Review; get it here)
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie; second in the series of Raadch novels, with a fierce core of justice and a protagonist who is more than human. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Appliance, by J.O. Morgan; set of short stories about the transformation of society caused by the invention of a teleporter. (Review; get it here)

The ones to avoid:
(from the Clarke slush pile)
The Hunt – for Allies, by David Geoffrey Adams; badly written and incomprehensible. (Review; get it here)
Harpan’s Worlds: Worlds Apart, by Terry Jackman; MilSF rubbish. (Review; get it here)

Non-fiction

86 (25%) of these books were non-fiction, the third highest number in twenty years (after last year and 2009) and 7th highest percentage. It’s boosted by the Black Archives, which I am reading at the rate of two every month. (I’ll catch up to current publication in the summer.)

Top non-fiction book of the year:
The January 6 report, by a special committee of the House of Representatives. Outlines in awful detail what happened on the day that Donald Trump incited his supporters to attempt to overthrow American democracy. A warning for what could lie ahead of us in 2024. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins; winner of the BSFA Award and the Hugo, a humane and detailed account of Pratchett’s life and writing style. (Review; get it here)
Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton; the best biography I have yet read of the fascinating nineteenth century actor, writer and activist. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman; a lovely collection of thoughtful pieces on Tolkien, the Inklings and fantasy more generally. (Review; get it here)

The ones to avoid:
Dispatches from Chengdu, by Abdiel Leroy, and Charmed in Chengdu, by Michael O’Neal; two dreadful books in which American expats show their white asses while working in China. (Review; get them here and here)

Doctor Who

I read 37 Doctor Who fiction books this year (11%), which is the 12th highest number and 16th highest percentage of the last twenty years. But broadening out to include non-fiction and comics, the number goes up to 79 (23%), the 5th highest number and 10th highest percentage since I started keeping track. Again, the Black Archives add to the latter total.

Top Doctor Who book of the year:
Doctor Who: The Giggle, by James Goss; inventive and imaginative adaptation of the last David Tennant episode for the printed page. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
(Black Archive) The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton; almost all of the Black Archive monographs are very very good, but I think this was my favourite of the year, shedding more light onto my favourite story of Old Who. (Review; get it here)
(comics) The Weeping Angels of Mons, by Robbie Morrison et al; there have been a number of treatments of Doctor Who and the First World War, but this is one of the best for my money, featuring the Tenth Doctor. (Review; get it here)
(another novelisation) Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara, by David Fisher; brings a lot more to his TV script than we had previously seen. (Review; get it here)
(Faction Paradox) Erasing Sherlock, by Kelly Hale; I had already given up on the Faction Paradox sequence by the time I got around to reading this, but to my surprise it worked very well for me. (Review; get it here)

Welcome re-reads:
Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke; one of the best Old Who adaptations, the novel version of the Pertwee story Doctor Who and the Silurians. (Review; get it here)
Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat; adaptation of the two stories that closed off the Eleventh Doctor era, tightening up and filling out the story we saw on screen. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
The Daleks, collection of strips from TV Century 21 magazine from 1965-67, told from the point of view of the malevolent pepperpots and really very enjoyable. (Review; out of print)

The one to avoid:
Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, by Philip Martin. Apparently the book of a video which I haven’t seen, and don’t really want to. (Review; get it here)

Non-genre

I read 29 non-genre fiction books this year (8%), the 14th highest number and 16th highest percentage of twenty years. My selection procedure tends to favour Doctor Who and other sf these days.

Top non-genre book of the year:
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin; a well-told, gripping and moving story about two friends from California who end up writing computer games together. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
Winter, by Ali Smith; a short but very intense novel about a family Christmas in England, the recent political past, and questions of identity. (Review; get it here)
The Cider House Rules, by John Irving; I had not read this before, but it’s a heart-breaking saga of a New England orphanage in the mid-twentieth century, situating abortion in its human context. (Review; get it here)

Welcome re-reads:
Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers; the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, one of the best known books still in circulation from 1923, and still a great read. (Review; get it here)
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; short but very effective character study of the central character and of a whole society in New York State just after the First World War. (Review; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Jill, by Amy Dillwyn; of the half-dozen novels written in the 1880s by my distant cousin, a prominent Welsh feminist, this is the best, taking her title character all around Europe in search of female comfort and enlightenment. (Review; get it here)

The one to avoid:
Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent; an attempt to write more Myles na Gopaleen-style anecdotes about the poet and the writer. Why? (Review; get it here)

Comics

A relatively low year for comics reading also, with 28 in total (8%), the 6th highest number and 12th highest percentage in my records.

More than half of those were Doctor Who comics, covered above. Of the other 13:

Top comic of the year:
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes; I’m not hugely invested in the Supergirl / Superman mythos, but I thought this did great things with great characters. (Review; get it here)

Honorable mentions to:
The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel; reflections on fitness, literature and love. (Review; get it here)
Jaren van de Olifant, by Willy Linthout; dealing with a family member’s suicide, expanded by 25% from the first edition. (Not yet reviewed; get it here)

The one you haven’t heard of:
Neptune, vols 1 and 2, by Leo; a nice two-part taster for the work of the great Brazilian-French artist and writer, carrying on the story of Kim from the Aldébaran Cycle. (Review; get it here and here in French, here and here in English)

The one to avoid:
Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski; won the Hugo, clearly vey popular in China, but I could not make head nor tail of it. (Review; get it here)

Others

I read four works of poetry, and one play. They are all very good. In the order that I read them:

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness (review; get it here)
Metamorphoses, by Ovid tr. Stephanie McCarter (review; get it here)
Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes (review; get it here)
Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles (review; get it here)
The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran (review; get it here)

Book of the year

This is actually a fairly easy choice. The Arthur C. Clarke Award judging process is one of the most pleasurable sf-related activities I have engaged in (stop looking at me like that) and I’m very happy with the shortlist. I will be honest; I personally went back and forth between E.J. Swift’s the Coral Bones and the eventual winner, but on reflection I’m happy to name my book of 2023 as the glorious satire on environmental destruction, Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, to which we gave the award. Here is my write-up, and you can get it here.

Previous Books of the Year:

2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here)
2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here)
2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here)
2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here)
2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here)
2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here)
– Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here)
2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here)
2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here)
2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here)
2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here)
2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here)
2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (review; get it here).
– Best book I actually blogged about in 2015: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here)
2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here)
2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here)
2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here)
2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here)
2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here)
2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)
2022: The Sun is Open, by Gail McConnell (review; get it here)

Sunday and December books

Posted on 31 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Sunday books

(This will shift to Mondays as of tomorrow week)

Last books finished
Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson
Lunar Descent, by Allen Steele
In Xanadu, by Lavie Tidhar
The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
Emotional Chemistry, by Simon Forward
Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
iLobby.eu, by Caroline de Cock

December Reading

Non-fiction 7 (YTD 86)
Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, by Joan Russell Noble
Invasion of the Dinosaurs, by Jon Arnold
Atlas of Irish History, by Ruth Dudley Edwards
Into the Unknown, eds. Laura Clarke and Patrick Gyger
The Haunting of Villa Diodati, by Philip Purser-Hallard
Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson
iLobby.eu, by Caroline de Cock

Non-genre 2 (YTD 29)
The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

SF 5 (YTD 164)
Giants at the End of the World, eds. Johanna Sinisalo & Toni Jerrmann
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell
Lunar Descent, by Allen Steele
In Xanadu, by Lavie Tidhar

Doctor Who 5 (YTD 37)
Doctor Who: The Star Beast, by Gary Russell
Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, by Malcolm Hulke
Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder, by Mark Morris
Doctor Who: The Giggle, by James Goss
Emotional Chemistry, by Simon Forward

Comics 2 (YTD 28)
Facing Fate: The Good Companion, by Nick Abadzis et al
Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout

4,900 pages (YTD 86,900)
7/21 (YTD 148/351) by non-male writers (Edwards, Clarke, de Cock, Howard, Sinisalo, St John Mandel, illustrators of The Good Companion)
None (YTD 42/351) by a non-white writer
3 rereads (Station Eleven, Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, Emotional Chemistry)

312 books currently tagged unread – down 26 from last month after some reorganising

Reading now

The Future, by Naomi Alderman
Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne

Coming soon (perhaps)

After Life, by Al Ewing et al
Blackpool Revisited, by John Collier
Vincent and the Doctor, by Paul Driscoll
Doctor Who and the Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Terrance Dicks
The Talons of Weng-Chiang, by Dale Smith
Rule of Law, by Glynis Breitenbach
The Beautifull Cassandra, by Jane Austen
Attack on Thebes, by M.D. Cooper
Three Plays, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
A Life in Questions, by Jeremy Paxman
Strawberry and the Soul Reapers, by Tite Kubo
The Dawnhounds, by Sasha Stronach
Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang
“The New Mother”, by Eugene Fischer
“Georgia on my Mind”, by Charles Sheffield
Tintin au Pays de l’Or Noir, by Hergé
Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North
The Wheels of Chance, by H.G. Wells
Confusion, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Babel, by R.F. Kuancg
Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch
The Pragmatic Programmer, by David thomas and Andrew Hunt
The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman
Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak

Annual roundup to come shortly.

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Posted on 30 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Everything Everywhere All at Once won the 2023 Best Picture Oscar, and six others: Best Director (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. It also won the Ray Bradbury Award and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.

I was in the hall in Chengdu when the Hugo result was announced, and there was a collective gasp of delight at what was clearly felt to be a win for the home team. I heard or saw someone comment afterwards that this is remarkable because you can’t actually watch it in China. That comment is rather deluded – for all I know, it may not have been released in cinemas, but you can bet for sure that it has been watched by many many people in China. In any case, it got precisely half the first preference votes for the Hugo, and sailed across the line on the second stage.

The other Oscar nominees for Best Picture were All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking. I have seen none of them. The other Hugo finalists were Turning Red, Nope, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Avatar: The Way of Water again and a TV series. The only one of these that I have seen is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; and I’m afraid the only other films from last year that I can remember seeing are Glass Onion and Enola Holmes 2. IMDB users rank EEAaO 4th on one list and 7th on the other, with only The Batman ahead of it on both.

Here’s a trailer.

I spotted two actors who had been in previous Hugo/Bradbury winners, though none from previous Oscar winners. The first of these, obviously, is Michelle Yeoh, who is the protagonist Evelyn Wang here and was also Yu Shu Lien, one of the lead characters in Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon back in 2000.

You may be scratching your head about the other returnee from a Hugo / Nebula winning film. It is James Hong, who plays Gong Gong, Michelle Yeoh’s character’s father here, and was also Hannibal Chew, the maker of replicants’ eyes, in Blade Runner back in 1982. Given that he was born in 1929, and would therefore have been at least 91 when filming EEAaO, he must be the oldest actor that I have featured in these vignettes. Forty years is also one of the longest gaps between appearances. His cinema career started in 1956.

This is the last of these posts about Oscar-winning films, so I’m also going to salute the other two leads who won Oscars, both of whom I know from other films of long ago. Jamie Lee Curtis is the tax official Deirdre Beaubeirdre here, totally inhabiting the character, and of course was in A Fish Called Wanda back in 1988.

And Ke Huy Quan, playing Michelle Yeoh’s character’s husband Waymond Wang here, was Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom back in 1984, when he was twelve.

Young F, who is now a wage-earner, bought a Blu-Ray player for our household as a Christmas present, and I went out and bought EEAaO as the first thing to watch on it. (Nineteen years ago, we bought our first DVD player and watched Finding Nemo with F, then aged five, and Casablanca after he had gone to bed.) Of course, it was a Belgian DVD so we had the slight cognitive dissonance of the original soundtrack, in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, and our choice of Dutch or French subtitles, but no option for English subtitles. We opted for Dutch, which is the language of F’s education (and to be honest I’m also a bit more comfortable in it than in French). But we therefore didn’t see quite the same film that you may have done.

Opinnion is firmly mixed on EEAaO, but F and I loved it. It combines the domestic comedy of the central character getting to grips with her failing marriage, her overbearing elderly father, and her relationship with her lesbian daughter, with the revelation that she is one of a number of parallel Evelyns across the spectrum of multiverses, fighting the forces of evil incarnate in a being who looks just like her daughter. This Bilbo-like shift between the domestic and the fantastic is elegantly and eloquently done. Michelle Yeoh in particular conveys the many different aspects of Evelyn well, the action sequences are superb, the special effects are convincing and the music backs up the on-screen performances without intruding.

I think that part of what makes the film work is that it is perhaps a psychological parable too. Like all of us, Evelyn contains multitudes, of which she is not necessarily aware at the start of the story. By the end, she has integrated all of her selves and achieved wholeness, and learned also to accept difference in her family; as well as defeating the forces of cosmic evil. What more could you ask for at Chinese New Year?

I’m ranking it 18th out of 95 Oscar winners, just above 20% of the way down, after that somewhat different domestic drama Terms of Endearment and ahead of that other tale of psychological integration and disintegration, Midnight Cowboy. Stand by for a review of the whole concept of watching the Oscar winners in sequence.

I’m also ranking it 18th, this time out of 65, in my list of winners of the Hugo / Nebula / Bradbury awards, just below the vivid action-filled A Clockwork Orange and above the universe-crossing Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s a stronger field. I may also do a post linking the Hugo / Nebula / Bradbury winners over the years.

But in the meantime, thank you for bearing with me through this series of posts, which I started in September 2017, when the world was a very different place.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

Posted on 29 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Frank lived in a glass tower on the south edge of the city, overlooking the lake. Jeevan left the park and waited awhile on the sidewalk, jumping up and down for warmth, boarded a streetcar that floated like a ship out of the night and leaned his forehead on the window as it inched along Carlton Street, back the way he had come. The storm was almost a whiteout now, the streetcar moving at a walking pace. His hands ached from compressing Arthur’s unwilling heart. The sadness of it, memories of photographing Arthur in Hollywood all those years ago. He was thinking of the little girl, Kirsten Raymonde, bright in her stage makeup; the cardiologist kneeling in his gray suit; the lines of Arthur’s face, his last words—“The wren …”—and this made him think of birds, Frank with his binoculars the few times they’d been bird-watching together, Laura’s favorite summer dress which was blue with a storm of yellow parrots, Laura, what would become of them? It was still possible that he might go home later, or that at any moment she might call and apologize. He was almost back where he’d started now, the theater closed up and darkened a few blocks to the south. The streetcar stopped just short of Yonge Street, and he saw that a car had spun out in the middle of the tracks, three people pushing while its tires spun in the snow. His phone vibrated again in his pocket, but this time it wasn’t Laura.

This was the winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015, my first year as a judge (my second year was this year). We had considered, but not shortlisted, the winners of the Tiptree Award (The Girl in the Road and My Real Children), the BSFA Award (Ancillary Sword) and the Nebula Award (Annihilation) but not the Hugo (The Three-Body Problem). The other shortlisted books were The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North; Memory of Water, by Emmi Itälanta; The Girl With All The Gifts, by M.R. Carey; The Book of Strange New Things, by Michel Faber; and Europe in Autumn, by Dave Hutchinson. I liked them all, but I liked Station Eleven best.

The Clarke vow of secrecy means that I can’t say anything about the judging process, but I can, I think, share what I wrote to the other judges after first reading it. I said:

I thought this was very good – loyal to numerous post-disaster predecessors (definite Earth Abides, possibly After London, nods also to Heinlein I think) but cooking something new and very effective from the old ingredients.

I stand by that. I found it a very fresh read now, with a couple of interesting plot lines played out against a generally horrible and fascinating background, and a close examination of how the end of the world might affect you. It’s a grim story, of course, with lots of death, but it really keeps you reading, and I feel that we got it right. I still like it more than any of the other award winners of that year.

Of course the Station Eleven I read in 2015 is not the Station Eleven you will read in 2023 or 2024. It has been turned into a pretty successful TV series (which I haven’t seen), which means that the popular culture perception of the story is now on the screen rather than on the page. But rather more importantly, we have all now lived through a global pandemic, which was not quite as devastating as the one portrayed in Station Eleven, though this was not immediately apparent in March and April 2020.

I think that Station Eleven survived the pandemic better than Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book. Sometimes sf tells us about the future; more often about the present; and sometimes about the past, Station Eleven now does all three, in a way that it didn’t on first publication. You can get it here.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs, by Jon Arnold (and Malcolm Hulke)

Posted on 28 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched Invasion of the Dinosaurs in 2007, I wrote:

Notoriously, the first episode of Invasion of the Dinosaurs exists only in black and white, while the other five are in colour (it would all have been in colour when shown in January/February 1974). Also notoriously, the actual dinosaurs themselves are absolutely terrible as special effects. There are no two ways about it: they are embarrassing puppets pasted onto their scenes by unconvincing CSO.

If you can ignore the awfulness of the dinosaurs, it’s not such a bad story; like many Pertwee tales, it is a bit too long, but the two basic bits of plot – conspiracy at the highest levels of government to Take Over/Destroy England, and the people who think they are on a spaceship to colonise the nearest star – are both rather good and well enough worked out, with their motives a bit of a reprise of The Green Death but with the environmentalists now the bad guys. The cliff-hanger where Sarah is told that she’s been in space for three months, and the scene where she proves she isn’t by walking out of the airlock, are both real jewels.

The main plot twist involving the regular cast, however, is a slightly different matter. Captain Yates, the Brigadier’s deputy since Terror of the Autons, turns out to be in league with the bad guys, yet can’t quite bring himself to do the Doctor harm. The scene where we discover his betrayal is handled with no dramatic tension whatever, and his motivations are not really explored at all. The Brigadier and Benton get all the good lines, but there’s interesting narrative tension among the villains as well.

If it hadn’t been for the dinosaurs, this would probably be remembered as one of the great Pertwee stories despite the not-quite-connected plot. As it is, you just have to close your eyes when they are on-screen; but it’s still way ahead of, say, The Mutants. (I wonder if an audio version of this, with linking narrative by Elisabeth Sladen or Nicholas Courtney, might work a bit better?)

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:

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 couldn’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.

All the above points occurred to me again as I rewatched it this time. I would also add that the London setting is used effectively, especially in the devastated and empty street scenes of the first couple of episodes, and the sense of enclosure and subterfuge in the Minister’s office later on. (Though the starship passengers look like real idiots for not smelling a rat sooner.) And Elisabeth Sladen is on particularly good form.

I knew Hulke’s novelisation (of his own script) well as a kid. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

‘The signal’s very faint, sir.’ The radio operator turned up the volume control on his console to ‘full’. ‘It’s no good, sir. They’ve faded out altogether.’

When I reread it in 2008 I wrote:

I am not sure if this is the best of this run of novels (and I’m certain it’s not the best of the Season 11 novels, as Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders clearly takes that trophy) but it is certainly the most interesting. As commenters to my last entry noted, it starts with a lovely vignette of a Scot in London for the football who becomes a victim of the dinosaurs; there are other little bits of depth added as well, Professor Whitaker becoming very camp, and a couple of odd extra details – the Doctor is described as having “a mop of curly hair” (shurely shome mishtake?) and he talks about the Mary Celeste again as he did in Doctor Who and the Sea Devils. Also, of course, the book loses the appalling visual effects of the original programme – these dinosaurs are flesh and blood, not rubber!

Yet at the same time it is a bit too over-earnest, not quite as mature as Hulke’s better novels (Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters and Doctor Who and the Green Death), so it doesn’t quite get its fourth star from me.

It is interesting that both this and the previous story are about the bad guys shunting people (and in this case dinosaurs) between the present and the past.

The viewpoint character in the opening chapter is from Glasgow, a point I missed when compiling my list of mentions of the city in Doctor Who last month. One other detail added by Hulke for the novelisation is that Butler, the character played by Martin Jarvis, has a large facial scar, and is also made more complex, doubting the wisdom of the grand plan at an earlier stage. You can get it here.

Jon Arnold, who has previously delivered solid analysis of Rose, Scream of the Shalka and The Eleventh Hour in the Black Archive series, has delivered another decent and readable piece of work here.

A short introduction reflects on the context of the story, with the end of the Pertwee era coinciding with unusual political instability in the UK.

The first chapter, “London Falling”, looks at the way in which London has been portrayed in Doctor Who overall, especially in this story.

The second chapter, “The Politics of the Dinosaurs”. looks in detail at the political disarray of early 1970s Britain and its reflections in Doctor Who.

The third chapter, “The Golden Age”, looks at similar iterations of the Golden Age narrative, including the 2005 reality TV show Space Cadets and Douglas Adams’ Golgafrinchams. The second paragraph, with quote and footnotes, is:

The earliest known mention of a golden age occurs in Hesiod’s poem Works and Days (c700 BCE). In this poem, the author outlined his five Ages of Man: the golden age, the silver age, the bronze age, the heroic age and the iron age, with the last of these being Hesiod’s own time⁴. The names of Hesiod’s ages are derived from the materials from which he believed Zeus constructed humanity (with the heroic age being one of demigods, perhaps an early indication that Hesiod’s metaphor did not quite cover the scheme of society he wished to use – an early example of golden ages being a let-down). The conception of the golden age as an idealised lost nirvana is clear from his description:

“The race of men that the immortals who dwell on Olympus made first of all was of gold […] they lived like gods, with carefree heart, remote from toil and misery. Wretched old age did not affect them either, but with hands and feet ever unchanged they enjoyed themselves in feasting, beyond all ills, and they died as if overcome by sleep. All good things were theirs, and the grain-giving soil bore its fruits of its own accord in unstinted plenty, while they at their leisure harvested their fields in contentment amid abundance.’⁵

⁴ Believed to be around the last third of the eighth century BCE. West, ML, ed, Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, p10.
⁵ Hesiod, Works and Days, p87.

The fourth and longest chapter, “The Immortal Hulke”, looks at the career and beliefs of Malcolm Hulke, who of course was a Communist at one point in his life and also left a legacy of writing about television. It does not explain Hulke’s obsession with reptiles.

The first of three appendices, “20 Years Before Jurassic Park“, makes a case that the dinosaurs are not really all that awful by 1970s standards. It’s difficult to make this a very strong case, hwoever.

The second appendix, “KKLAK!”, looks in detail at the changes Hulke made to the story when adapting it as a novel.

The third appendix, “‘Ullo Jon! Got a New Motor?'” looks at the origin and fate of the Whomobile.

I would have liked to read some analysis of one more topic – the treachery of Mike Yates, which is briefly referred to in passing, but which as I said earlier was the most interesting thing that has been done with a regular character since Katarina and Sara were killed off eight years earlier.

Apart from that, it’s generally a satisfactory and sympathetic piece of work, looking at a flawed but fondly remembered story and explaining where it came from. Normally I like to get a bit more of the behind-the-scenes gossip, but I’m happy with what we get here.

Anyway, you can get it here.

Recollections of Virginia Woolf by her Contemporaries, edited by Joan Russell Noble

Posted on 27 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third sontribution (from John Lehmann):

By that time the Press, though comparatively small and run on the simplest lines, had become a successful and well-known publishing centre. It had four extremely valuable advantages. It had always published Virginia Woolf’s works since the First World War, but after the success of Orlando in 1928 Virginia was no longer a highly thought of experimental novelist of limited appeal, but a best-seller. Her friend Vita Sackville-West – Mrs Harold Nicolson – had had several books of travel published by the Press, but in 1930 she had produced a novel called The Edwardians, which had one of the greatest successes in the history of the Press. The third advantage it had was the International Psycho- Analytical Library, which included the works of Sigmund Freud. At the suggestion of Lytton Strachey’s brother James, a keen student of psychoanalysis, Leonard, with great shrewdness, and against the advice of some distinguished old hands in the publishing world, had taken on the English-speaking rights of the Library in the early ‘twenties. It flourished exceedingly. The fourth advantage was, of course, Leonard and Virginia’s own names as leaders of what was known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among intellectuals it was a much coveted prize to be accepted for publication by the Hogarth Press. It had begun its work in the tiniest way possible in 1917, and by the end of 1919 had published only five books; but one of them was T. S. Eliot’s Poems, another was Virginia’s own first experimental attempt, Kew Gardens, and a third was Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude. Two of them had been printed and bound by Leonard and Virginia themselves.

First published in 1972, thirty years after her death, this pulls together 27 short sketches of Virginia Woolf by friends, relatives and colleagues, some previously published and some new contributions. It provoked me to think how little we can really know of anyone; each of these people saw a slightly different side of her, often through a mutual involvement with the Hogarth Press, and there is much less about her inner life than you would get, for instance, in Hermione Lee’s biography. We get the same anecdotes told from different perspectives; we get different takes on her behaviour and attitudes; we get a sense of someone who was loved by many but not really understood by anyone. I particularly noticed the varying accounts of her interactions with children and younger women; she was capable of showing immense sympathetic curiosity, but also of brutal rudeness. I suppose most of us are like that.

A couple of these pieces are surprisingly weak – Rebecca West admits that she didn’t really know her very well, and T.S. Eliot writes a short encomium which actually has very little content. But most of them are interesting and rewarding. One of the longest and most interesting is by William Plomer, who I confess I had not heard of but whose books I will now look out for. There’s also a moving contribution by Louie Mayer, the Woolfs’ housekeeper who was probably the last person to speak to her before her death. I think even if you’re not a big fan of Woolf’s writing, it’s a very interesting exercise to get a couple of dozen different personal perspectives on their memories of a particular individual; and if you are a fan of Woolf’s writing, it certainly adds to the appreciation of her work. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson.

The Fourteenth Doctor novelisations: The Star Beast (Gary Russell), Wild Blue Yonder (Mark Morris), The Giggle (James Goss)

Posted on 26 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

You wait five years for a new Doctor, and then two of them come along one after the other…

While we recover from the Fifteenth Doctor’s proper debut yesterday, you can relive the Fourteenth Doctor’s brief tenure in the three novelisations of his three stories, The Star Beast, Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle, each published electronically a few days after the respective episodes were shown, and available in paper form next month. Spoilers: One of them is likely to be my Doctor Who book of the year when I do my roundup of my 2023 reading on Sunday. I’ve also had a listen to a relevant Big Finish audio adaptation.

Doctor Who: The Star Beast is Gary Russell’s second novelisation of a Doctor Who TV story, his first being of the TV Movie from 1996, 27 years ago. (He also did four Sarah Jane novelisations, and much else.) The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Best thing to do, Doctor, he thought, is not get caught.

This is a good start to the new regime. (One of my personal complaints about the Chibnall era is that little attention was paid to the spinoff publications.) As well as faithfully transferring the on-screen action to the page, we get more characterisation for the minor characters, especially Sylvia and Rose, and some delightful tips of the hat to the comic strip on which the story was based – the steelworks is called Millson Wagner, in a tribute to the original writers, and the original new companion, Sharon, makes an offstage appearance as Fudge’s friend. Basically it’s what you want from a novelisation. You can get it here.

The Fourteenth Doctor TV story was not in fact the first adaptation of the original Star Beast comic. In 2019 Big Finish released audio versions of this and The Iron Legion, the first of the Doctor Who magazine strips, both starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, and for completeness I listened to both. They are quite long; The Iron Legion is almost two hours, The Star Beast 1h49m, and then there’s an hour of behind-the-scenes, and the material isn’t quite strong enough to bear the weight of it. But it is fun enough, a look at two old stories from a new angle, with some tidying up of loose ends in the plots.

NB in particular from The Iron Legion, Christine Kavanagh (who had a small part in The Diplomat) as June / Magog, the lead baddy, and Big Finish regulars Toby Longworth and Joseph Kloska as the robot Vesuvius and Morris; and from The Star Beast, Rhianne Starbuck as Sharon (she seems to have paused her acting career, which is a shame), Bethan Dixon Bate as Beep the Meep, and in a surprise twist, 1970s news reader Angela Rippon as herself. You can get it here.

The novelisation of Wild Blue Yonder is by Marc Morris, who has done a bunch of other Doctor Who books and plays, some of which I liked more than others. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Brate”) is:

There was no indication anything had been disturbed. The hover-buggy remained where they’d parked it; nothing had fallen over; nothing had become detached from the walls or roof and crashed to the ground.

Wild Blue Yonder was such a visual story, depending both on superb special effects and on twists in the plot, that the book version needs to be either a faithful screen-to-page adaptation or to take a completely different approach. Morris has (perhaps sensibly) gone for the first option, and the result is a workmanlike book that completists like me will want to have, but won’t be a gateway drug for anyone else. You can get it here.

It’s no secret that I rate James Goss as one of the best Doctor Who writers currently in business (eg here, here and here), so I awaited his novelisation of The Giggle with eager anticipation. The second paragraph of the third chapter (“Move 3”) is:

London burned. Flames poked out of windows. People stood on roofs, howling. Cars smashed into each other over and over. Double-decker buses lay toppled in the streets, people thronged the bridges, sometimes diving off, sometimes falling off, sometimes pushed off. She watched two boats down there in the Thames, playing a slow and stupid game of chicken. Neither boat blinked.

I have to say that my high expectations were more than exceeded. Goss tells the story from the perspective of the Toymaker (first-person Doctor Who books are very rare and not always successful), smooths off the edges, throws in some extra pinches of emotion and also some shifts of genre and format – at one point the book becomes a choose-your-own-adventure for Donna, and there are other puzzles throughout. I suspect that the paper version will be even nicer and it’s the only one of the three that I plan to get in hard copy. It’s a real tour de force, and you can get it here. I enjoyed this so much that I made it my very first post on Threads:

Post by @nwbrux

View on Threads

So, a good closing out of the brief Fourteenth Doctor era. (Though I haven’t yet read the DWM comic strip.)

The Church on Ruby Road

Posted on 25 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

I might just squee for a bit, rather non-verbally, but basically once again I loved this. The grownups are back in charge. Gatwa and Gibson are a great pair. The alternate timeline gimmick has been done much worse and more didactically in Who,and elsewhere. Not totally wild about the goblins, but again we have had much worse. And I don’t think we’ve ever had the Doctor actually singing on TV? And what of Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood – does she really not know the TARDIS at the start, or is she just making that up – have the events of the story changed her, or has she just changed her story?

Seriously though, I took an interest in the plotline about DNA testing, not least because I myself was once able to identify a foundling’s parents through DNA connections (mother then father). For any white person of British and/or Irish descent, there will be loads of connections in the various databases, perhaps not close ones, but they will be there. So we deduce that there’s something very odd about Ruby’s background. But then, the days of relatively normal backgrounds for Doctor Who companions have come and gone, I think.

Weekly reading blog

Posted on 24 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Current
Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson
The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
Lunar Descent, by Allen Steele

Last books finished
Into the Unknown, ed. Laura Clarke
The Haunting of Villa Diodati, by Philip Purser-Hallard
A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell

Next books
iLobby.eu, by Caroline De Cock
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse

Giants at the End of the World: A Showcase of Finnish Weird, eds. Johanna Sinisalo and Toni Jerrman

Posted on 22 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third story (“Snowfall” by Tiina Raevaara):

Kohotan katseeni. Aurinko on ehtinyt täyteen kirkkau-teensa, jäiset puut kimaltelevat. Talon takana metsästä työn-tyvä kallio kiiltelee huurteisena sekin. Kallion takia kuk-kapenkeissä on turha yrittää kasvattaa mitään: kesällä se piilottaa auringon taaksensa, heittää pihalle valtavan varjon. Nyt maa on jo jäässä.

I look up. The sun has reached its full brightness, the icy trees are glittering. The rock pushing out from the forest behind the house is also glimmering with frost. Because of this rock, it’s useless to try to grow anything in the flowerbeds: in the summer it hides the sun behind it and throws a huge shadow into the garden. Now the ground is frozen already.

Translated by Sara Norja

This was given as a freebie to all attenders of Worldcon 75 in Helsinki back in 2017, to boost the visibility of Finnish writers among attendees. To be honest the stories are skewed a little more towards horror than is my usual taste, but I really enjoyed the first one, “The Haunted House on Rockville Street” by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, and one in the very middle, “The Bearer of the Bone Harp”, by Emmi Itäranta. You can read it on the Internet Archive.

This was both the shortest unread book that I had acquired in 2017, and the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are Recollections of Virginia Woolf by her Contemporaries, ed. Joan Noble Russell, and Attack on Thebes by M.D. Cooper.

Facing Fate: The Good Companion, by Nick Abadzis et al

Posted on 21 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second frame from third part:

The culmination of the series of IDW Tenth Doctor comic albums that I’ve been reading since March, here all the various companion plotlines come together and there is a very satisfactory ending to the character arc for Gabby Gonzalez, the comics-only companion from New York. Really this whole series deserves the same recognition that the early DWM strips have; it’s beautifully done. It was especially evocative to read it at the same time as the Doctor / Donna story unfolded on TV. You can get it here.

This was the first book that I finished reading in December, so I’m three weeks off more or less. This gap will probably only widen over the break!

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

Posted on 20 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third section:

Und wenn nun auch Gregor durch seine Wunde an Beweglichkeit wahrscheinlich für immer verloren hatte und vorläufig zur Durchquerung seines Zimmers wie ein alter Invalide lange, lange Minuten brauchte – an das Kriechen in der Höhe war nicht zu denken –, so bekam er für diese Verschlimmerung seines Zustandes einen seiner Meinung nach vollständig genügenden Ersatz dadurch, daß immer gegen Abend die Wohnzimmertür, die er schon ein bis zwei Stunden vorher scharf zu beobachten pflegte, geöffnet wurde, so daß er, im Dunkel seines Zimmers liegend, vom Wohnzimmer aus unsichtbar, die ganze Familie beim beleuchteten Tische sehen und ihre Reden, gewissermaßen mit allgemeiner Erlaubnis, also ganz anders als früher, anhören durfte.

Because of his injuries, Gregor had lost much of his mobility—probably permanently. He had been reduced to the condition of an ancient invalid and it took him long, long minutes to crawl across his room—crawling over the ceiling was out of the question—but this deterioration in his condition was fully (in his opinion) made up for by the door to the living room being left open every evening. He got into the habit of closely watching it for one or two hours before it was opened and then, lying in the darkness of his room where he could not be seen from the living room, he could watch the family in the light of the dinner table and listen to their conversation—with everyone’s permission, in a way, and thus quite differently from before.

Well known, fascinating and awful; the story of a man who ceases to be a man, who finds that humanity, including his close family, collectively turns its back on him. Does his transformation represent disability? Sexual identity? Mental illness? Something else entirely? It doesn’t matter in a way; the writing is mesmerising.

It’s also thoroughly infused with a spirit of place. Kafka comprehensively conveys the feeling of those central European apartment blocks which you will find in Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Bratislava, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and dozens if not hundreds of other towns and cities throughout the former Habsburg Empire. And you really feel that you are in the city, with its trams, bureaucracy and social structure.

It’s a short story, but it packs a heck of a punch.

This was the top book by LibraryThing populatiry on my shelves that I had not yet blogged here. Next on that list is Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak.

Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro

Posted on 19 December 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

Second paragraph of third chapter:

AMI is a cross-party organisation that grew out of three initiatives: the group of city governments which passed motions declaring themselves “morally excluded” from the Spanish Constitution to express theirc omplete frustration with the Constitutional Court ruling against the Catalan Statute of Autonomy on June 28, 2010, the popular “consultations” that were held in more than 500 municipalities between 2009 and 2011, ad the spirit of the demonstration of July 10, 2010 itself, which represented a broad swath of the population which supports the Catalan right to decide.

A beautifully illustrated book, given to me by the author, listing numerous campaign tactics used by the proponents of independence for Catalonia in the heady years from the 2006 Statute of Autonomy to the botched independence declaration in 2017. A lot of this is genuinely inspiring activism: the people who went to all 50 US state capitals to present their case to the governors; the human towers and works of permanent and less permanent art; the integration with sports.

A lot of this could in fact be copied elsewhere in a society with a reasonable amount of freedom of expression, though there’s not many places with both a strong independence movement and an open society. You can get it here.

The Catalan debate is moving onto another plane now, with the Spanish government attempting to draw a line under 2017 and move on, while being subjected to attempted sabotage by the Right both at home and abroad. My personal suspicion is that a fairly held official referendum on independence in Catalonia would deliver a majority for continued participation in the Spanish state, and would kill serious talk of independence for a generation. (If it had not been for Brexit, this would have been the medium-term outcome in Scotland.) Those who say that it’s against the law and the constitution need to remember that in the end, the law and the constitution are shaped by popular sentiment and not vice versa.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next in that pile is Atlas of Irish History, by Ruth Dudley Edwards.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

In Xanadu, by Lavie Tidhar

Monday reading

Prague

Books of 1974, 1924 and 1874

Lunar Descent, by Allen Steele

Bee Quest, by Dave Goulson

A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell

The Haunting of Villa Diodati, by Philip Purser-Hallard

Monday reading

Jim Bennett, 1947-2023

The 95 Best Picture Oscar winners: some statistics

Sources

Time of setting

Into the Unknown, eds. Laura Clarke and Patrick Gyger

Joan Urquhart, 1916-2023

Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout

An Atlas of Irish History, by Ruth Dudley Edwards; and in search of W.H. Bromage

2024, according to Science Fiction

2023 books in review

Previous Books of the Year:

Sunday and December books

Sunday books

December Reading

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

Invasion of the Dinosaurs, by Jon Arnold (and Malcolm Hulke)

Recollections of Virginia Woolf by her Contemporaries, edited by Joan Russell Noble

The Fourteenth Doctor novelisations: The Star Beast (Gary Russell), Wild Blue Yonder (Mark Morris), The Giggle (James Goss)

The Church on Ruby Road

Weekly reading blog

Top blog posts of 2023 (and some social media)

Giants at the End of the World: A Showcase of Finnish Weird, eds. Johanna Sinisalo and Toni Jerrman

Facing Fate: The Good Companion, by Nick Abadzis et al

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro