It’s good to have visitors, and it’s also tremendously helpful when the younger members of the household help out with the catering arrangements for the smaller guests:
Whoniversaries 22 August: Reign of Terror #3, Slipback #5 and #6, more Paris
None that grabbed me
ii) broadcast anniversaries
22nd August 1964: broadcast of ‘A Change of Identity’, third eisode of the story we now call The Reign of Terror. Susan and Barbara are rescued; Ian escapes; the Doctor disguises himself as a Regional Officer (magnificent uniform), but the jailer has rumbled him…
22nd August 1985: broadcast of episodes 5 and 6 of Slipback on radio. Eric Saward still thinks he is Douglas Adams and the Doctor manages not to prevent the Big Bang. In response to queries from Alex, it seems that the story was broadcast twice fortnightly rather than weekly; I don’t know if that was also true for Pirate Radio Four in which it was embedded.
22nd August 1572: The Doctor reappears, and he and Steven make it back to the Tardis, leaving poor Anne Chaplet to face the awful events of the following day. (as shown in The Massacre, 1966)
22nd August 1941: climax of the earlier timeline of Gary Russell’s 2008 Torchwood novel, The Twilight Streets.
The Whispering Forest
The Fifth Doctor, Tegan and Turlough, reunited with Nyssa in Cobwebs, find themselves in a mysterious human colony where the original settlers have forgotten what they are there for and are now the prey of mysterious forces. To be honest the plot isn’t the strong point here, but Lyon is rather good at catching the dynamics of Team Tardis of 1983, and Hayley Attwell turns in a notable guest performance as the potential young leader of the locals. A decent enough sf play which would engage but not fascinate the non-Who fan; sometimes that is enough.
August Books 21) Comrade J, by Pete Earley
This book, about the career of Russian spy Sergei Tretyakov before his defection to the US, was strongly recommended to me by someone who said that its portrayal of how intelligence agents handle contacts was scrupulously accurate (and my source is in a position to know). This was before the recent revelations about the group of deep cover Russian agents in the US and UK, and indeed before Tretyakov’s own sudden death in June this year (not revealed until July); my informant may have known about the former but I hope he was not tipped off about the latter in advance.
There is some interesting material, but the whole feels a bit shallow. For instance, Earley doesn’t seem to know much about the European Union and his account of COREU telegrams is confused and inaccurate; when his details on points that I know about are poor, I naturally become suspicious about the rest. Though other bits rang true: there is one beautiful Kafka moment (which Earley calls ‘a catch-22 situation’): one section of the Russian intelligence establishment in New York had the job of recruiting and converting FBI and CIA agents, but were also forbidden by their own regulations from having any contact with known FBI or CIA agents. This of course led to significant padding of reports, making it appear that the rather few genuine US contacts were more impressive than they were.
Earley does not examine the extent to which Tretyakov’s work actually affected Russian policy and actions more than would have been the case had he been an ordinary diplomat, and that is the biggest gap in the book (though of course it’s a much broader question equally applicable to Western intelligence agencies). There are two interesting passages about spreading disinformation among the academic community. I remember the Transdniestrian astroturf affair from a couple of years back, as chronicled by Edward Lucas at the time, which was a rather good example of this; but a more audacious claim is that the KGB simply invented the idea that the widespread use of atomic weapons would result in a “nuclear winter” in order to strengthen the anti-nuclear lobby in the West. I’ve no idea what the current status of nuclear winter theory is among climate scientists, and Earley doesn’t investigate this, simply accepting Tretyakov’s account that his colleagues made it all up, and again I wish he had checked a bit further.
One of the more interesting but less believable claims in the book is that Strobe Talbott, then a senior US official, was ‘played’ by a Russian official who was really in intelligence but pretended to be matey with him. Talbott, asked to respond, contends (entirely credibly, though Earley doesn’t seem to believe him) that he always expected and believed that his interlocutor was passing the entire contents of their conversations back to various contacts in Moscow, and spoke to him on that basis; he doesn’t add, but might have, that that is what makes such conversations worth while in the first place. The fact that Tretyakov (or his FBI/CIA handlers) wanted this story published is itself perhaps significant.
There is a cautionary tale there. My own policy with contacts who I know or suspect to be in that line of work is to treat them as I do ‘ordinary’ officials, or indeed reasonably motivated graduate students. If my interlocutors fancy they are getting better information from me than their competition, that is their lookout; any such conversation, from my point of view, is always at least partly about influencing government decision-makers or the wider epistemic community. This is a game played in both directions, of course; the details of how one of the world’s most famous services handles HUMINT are fascinating, and the general guidelines and specific judgement calls that Tretyakov and his colleagues made when deciding how and when to develop contacts make for interesting reading.
The other interesting human story, though of course one has to treat it with due caution, is the slow disillusionment of Tretyakov and his family with Russia after the fall of Communism: the increasing surrender of Russian territory as well as the economy to criminal oligarchs, backed by what passed for the central government, must have been an awful process of disillusionment for all patriotic Russians. Each has made their own accommodation with the new state of affairs; Tretyakov chose to turn his back on it and seek a new beginning. He enjoyed it for less than ten years.
Whoniversary 21 August: still in Paris
21st August 1572: Admiral de Coligny is shot and wounded; the Abbot of Amboise, suspected of being an impostor who has deraied the assassination plans, is killed by his own allies; Steven (who is fresh from the mayhem of The Daleks’ Master Plan) thinks it is the Doctor who has been slain. (as shown in The Massacre, 1966)
August Books 20) Dubliners, by James Joyce
Q: What is the difference between a joist and a girder?
A: Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust.
Joyce would probably have appreciated this apocryphal exchange between an Irish arts student and the manager of the building site where he was applying for a job. Not that there’s a lot of laughs in Dubliners; it’s an unsentimental, realistic, very recognisable set of sketches of life a hundred years ago in the capital city, which itself is a character lurking in the backgroound of the stories. It’s noticeable how many of the characters are mildly dissolute young men, though Joyce does his best with others as well, and although, for instance, “The Dead” is told largely from Gabriel’s point of view, the story is about the women – his aunts, the radical Miss Ivors, and his own wife Gretta who he knows less well than he thought. They are all pretty vivid sketches; “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” particularly caught my eye because of my own past activities, though in fact it’s much more about the social relationships of the committee room team than about electoral politics as such. I read both Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses many years ago, and am rather ashamed that it took me until now to consume the 161 pages of measured prose in this collection; at least I have finally done so.
August Books 19) Diaspora, by Greg Egan
A book about a posthuman society – most people exist as virtual entities in the datanet of vast supercomputers – dealing with astrophysical disaster striking the earth and then trying to explore parallel universes. Lots of mathematical theory, but rather short on interesting characters or plot resolution; perhaps a bit like Stapledon without his trademark breathlessness. Glad to have finally ticked this off my list.
August Books 18) Legacy of the Daleks, by John Peel
Susan’s departure from the Tardis at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth was the first departure of a comopanion, and in some ways the least satisfactorily resolved of all; what sort of life does she face, presumably one of the Doctor’s own race, but living with humans for the rest of her life? (When she pops up again in The Five Doctors we are told nothing of what she has been up to in the meantime.) The 1994 radio play Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman? had her wandering back to the twentieth century and becoming European Commissioner for Education, but it is not a serious attempt to contribute to canon. Big Finish tried a bit harder with Marc Platt’s An Earthly Child at the end of last year, which brought Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor back to Earth decades after Susan’s departure, and guest-starred McGann’s son Jake playing Susan’s son Alex, but I wasn’t completely convinced.
By contrast, I loved John Peel’s Legacy of the Daleks. Peel is a bit of a guilty pleasure for me – I rate his novelisations of the black and white era Dalek stories very highly, and appreciate his attempts to wrest continuity and character from material which is not always promising. Here, he has Susan trying to manage her relationship with the aging David, putting on make-up to appear nearer his age when they are together in public, in a post-Dalek England which has become a patchwork of feudal fiefdoms. Throw into the mix not only the visiting Eighth Doctor, but also the Delgado!Master attempting to Take Over The Universe by reviving the Daleks and stealing their tech, and the book ends up pushing many of my fanboy buttons, ending with hope for Susan and a prologue to one of my favourite TV stories. Best Eighth Doctor Adventure I’ve read for a while.
August Books 17) With the Light… / 光とともに…, vol 2, by Keiko Tobe
I read and much enjoyed the first volume of this manga series last year. It concerns the education of Hikaru Azuma, a young Japanese autistic boy, as told largely from the viewpoint of his mother Sachiko. At this stage the series is settling down into being a regular feature in the Japanese magazine For Mrs, targeted at young mothers, so we get a certain amount of recapitulation and also re-education of the reader through new characters – first the parent of a new child in Hikaru’s class, who has had a much more difficult time of it and is much more traumatised by her dealings with authority, and then a difficult transition at school with a new special education teacher who isn’t really up to it and a new headmaster who doesn’t really care. Tobe’s art as ever captures the expressions of autistic children brilliantly, and is pretty good on other points too; and I was also fascinated by the various insights into Japanese elementary school culture which were included as local context but were often more educational for me than the main thrust of the story.
Keiko Tobe died earlier this year without finishing the series, but I will certainly get through the remaining four volumes.
Whoniversaries 20 August: a bumper crop
i) births and deaths
A cracking selection today:
I don’t usually do these, but this is a significant one.
20th August 1963: first ever production session of Doctor Who, as the opening credits are created.
20th August 1572: Steven, trying to find the Doctor, bluffs his way into the Abbot’s presence and overhears the plot to assassinate Admiral de Coligny. (as shown in The Massacre, 1966)
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-20-2010
-
Excellent commentary – transferable to many situations.
-
Lest we forget
-
Judging by the newspaper coverage, successful A-Level students are mainly female and cute.
August Books 16) Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, by Thomas Merton
I have long had a vague interest in Thomas Merton, who became a Trappist monk after a dissolute youth (part of which was spent studying at my own later stamping ground, Clare College, Cambridge), and so was looking forward to reading this collection of his writings from the early 1960s – not least because I have been uncomfortably aware that I have enjoyed reading atheist tracts (Lucretius, Russell) more than Christian apologetics in the last few years.
I wasn’t disappointed. A lot of this has dated – Merton’s historical experience is of the Second World War and he writes in the context of the Cuban missile crisis and the Civil Rights movement – but basically he has a sane, humane, liberal take on Christianity and belief which I find comfortably close to my own prejudices and instincts. I winced a little at his initial naïve enthusiasm for Vatican II, knowing now how badly the Church has failed to follow through on the spirit of those times, but then a later piece in the collection accurately predicts the problems of the enterprise, in outline if not in detail.
The presentation of the material is not perfect. On the one hand, we are given to understand that this is a kind of commonplace book for occasional jottings; on the other hand, the text has been revised and expanded for publication. It would have been better to have a more thematic treatment, and better yet to have an index. As it is, it reads a bit more like random ramblings of a middle-aged monk than it really deserves to.
Nevermore
The new series of Eighth Doctor plays from Big Finish began with Situation Vacant, where Joanna Kanska stole the show, guest starring as a hotel duty manager; this time Fenella Woolgar (who was Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp) steals the show, guest starring as an interstellar war criminal incarcerated in a jail designed with an Edgar Allan Poe theme. Alan Barnes is one of the best Big Finish writers, but this isn’t one of his best scripts, with a slightly daft premise and lots of references to Poe’s work including giant robot ravens chanting “Nevermore”. I haven’t read much Poe (though I do know the late Zelazny story which riffs off many of his works) so some of this may have gone over my head. However it’s probably fairly accessible to the non-Who fan who knows their Poe. (The new companion, I’m afraid, hasn’t really settled in for me as yet.)
August Books 15) The Moldovans: Romania, Russia and the Politics of Culture, by Charles King
A decade after it was published, this remains the most serious examination of the identity of the people(s) of Moldova, the little-known ex-Soviet republic wedged between Romania and Ukraine, and of its breakaway Transdniestria region, a thin strip along the Ukrainian border. Most of the territory of what is now Moldova, lying between the rivers Prut and Dniester, was in the old territory known as Bessarabia, annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812 and then by the much enlarged Kingdom of Romania in 1918, and then by the Soviet Union in 1940, reclaimed by Romania in 1941 and finally again by the Soviets in 1944. (Transdniestria’s history is linked but more complicated.) The majority of the population speaks a language described as Moldovan, but now acknowledged to be identical to Romanian; the cities and town, however, have tended to be concentrations of Russians, Ukrainians, and in earlier periods Jews. In the south of the country there are large districts where the local language is either Bulgarian or Gagauz, which is related to Turkish.
The subject of King’s book is the story of how and to what extent a separate Moldovan consciousness has developed, even though the attempts to produce a separate language failed. The Soviet Union attempted to establish Moldovan, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, as a literary standard, and it simply didn’t work; Romanian orthography is not easily adapted to Cyrillic (a memorable example is the case of Mr Mîţă, whose six children were all given different Cyrillic surnames by the hospital officials filling out their birth certificates). But at the same time, accepting the Romanian literary standard for their language did not mean seeking Romanian unification for their territory, even before taking into consideration the views of the large percentage of non-Romanian speakers in the population.
(It’s an interesting comment on the state of such debates in Eastern Europe that so many observers thought – and some still think – that unification with Romania is inevitable. In Belgium, Walloons and Flemings use the literary standard languages of our neighbours without becoming French or Dutch, and likewise in Switzerland. The Kosovars have no hesitation about describing themselves as Albanian, but like the Moldovans are more than wary of unification with their neighbours. Ireland’s use of English is slightly different because of the survival of an indigenous and separate language; while the Ulster Scots boondoggle is likely to go the way of Soviet Moldavian. But it’s also striking that the languages formerly known as Serbo-Croat have established themselves rather more credibly, even if Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and Montenegrins remain entirely able to understand each other.)
Transdniestria, Moldova’s separatist region, is a different matter. Although its sympathisers like to portray the issue as an ethnic one between the Slavic loyalties of the Transdniestrians and the supposed Romanian revanchism of Chişinău, thus fitting the same template as Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh, it’s actually more a case of the local elite, who used to run things – none of the top brass in the Communist Party was from the Bessarabian side of the river before 1989 – refusing to accept the new state of affairs post-independence. Unlike the leaders of Katanga or Biafra, they won the war, but have yet to win the peace (and indeed the vibes from Moscow lately cannot be terribly encouraging for Tiraspol). The one serious ethnic issue in Moldova was the problem of the Gagauz, but they have settled for local autonomy; their slightly more numerous Bulgarian neighbours have accepted integration (the prime minister before last was from their ranks).
I produced three reports on Moldova in my time at ICG, and apart from them (and Tony Hawks’ Playing the Moldovans at Tennis) there’s not a lot out there; and King’s book is still the taproot for most analysis of the country. But it is a very interesting and somewhat peculiar story in its own right, as a matter of general interest.
Whoniversaries 19 August: Paris and Ianto
19th August 1572: The Doctor and Steven land in Paris; the Doctor goes off to consult the apothecary Charles Preslin while Steven falls in with Huguenots, and the Abbot of Amboise arrives in Paris; guess who he looks like? (as shown in The Massacre, 1966)
19th August 1983: birth of Ianto Jones, later to join Torchwood.
That Ray Bradbury video
If you haven’t seen it yet, and you’re not in a work environment, and you have at least heard of Ray Bradbury, you will love this:
Rachel Bloom is obviously a name to watch out for in the future.
August Books 14) Faith in Europe?
A series of six lectures given in Westminster Cathedral in 2005 by Jean Vanier (founder of the Larche community), Mary McAleese, Timothy Radcliffe, Bob Geldof, Chris Patten and Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, addressing Europe and Christianity. Most of them are worthy but unsurprising. Chris Patten’s is, of course, the best written. Bob Geldof’s is weirdly wrong-headed and poorly structured on Europe but then very good on Africa. Mercifully brief.
Whoniversaries 18 August: The Smiths
18th August 1951: Sarah Jane Smith’s parents die in a car accident after attending the village fete at Foxgrove, as we see in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith (SJA, 2008).
18th August 1941: start of the earlier timeline in Gary Russell’s 2008 Torchwood novel, The Quiet Streets (haven’t read it myself).
Echoes of Grey
Latest of the Big Finish Companion Chronicles, bringing back Wendy Padbury as Zoë, in a tale of investigation of curious biological experimentation with the significantly named Achromatics at the Whitaker Institute, close to Zoë’s own time and space. I found myself wondering where this was going in the first half, but it picked up after the interval, basically as a narrative of Zoë remembering a past adventure out loud to a very interested listener (Ali, played by Emily Pithon). There is one really good idea here, which is the literary play on words linking the monsters and the title of the play; also Zoë’s loss of memory, induced by the Time Lords after The War Games, is worked into the plot in a slightly new way. Padbury’s impression of Troughton isn’t perfect but is distinctive. Decent stuff.
Whoniversaries 17 August: Graham Williams, The Dominators #2
17th August 1990: death in a shooting accident of Graham Williams, producer of the 15th to 17th seasons of Doctor Who (the fourth to sixth Fourth Doctor seasons, from Horror of Fang Rock to ShadaThe Invasion of Time and City of Death, and author of the unbroadcast story The Nightmare Fair which brought back the Celestial Toymaker (and was released in audio format by Big Finish last year).
17th August 1968: broadcast of episode 2 of The Dominators. The Doctor and Jamie are examined by the Dominators; Zoe goes to the capital and tries but fails to charm the Dulcian leadership. When she and Cully return to the island, the Dominators and Quarks blow up their cave…
August Books 13) The Wizard Knight, by Gene Wolfe
Compilation of two books originally published separately. The Knight and The Wizard, which rather seem to have sunk without trace since publication. I’m not wild about sword & sorcery as a sub-genre anyway, so couldn’t get vastly interested in whatever it was Wolfe was trying to do to it. Then I put the book aside for a few days, and coming back to it realised that I really didn’t care what happened after page 380. If I have missed something really special in the remaining 540 pages, feel free to notify me, with spoilers, in comments.
Whoniversaries 16 August: Real Time #3, Gwen Cooper, Slarvians
None that caught my eye
ii) broadcast anniversaries
16th August 2002: webcast of episode 3 of Real Time. More messing around the time portal with Six, Evelyn and the Cybermen. Turns out the Tardis won’t fit through it.
16th August 1978: birth of Gwen Cooper, who grows up to be a Cardiff policewoman who joins Torchwood. (cf birth of Eve Myles on 8 July 1978; as I said before, mmmmmmm.)
16th August 1979: The First Doctor and Susan encounter the snail-like Slarvians who are planning to take over Earth by hatching their eggs all over the planet. (As told in Samantha Baker’s “Childhood Living”, in the 2006 Short Trips: The Centenarian anthology – though I must admit I read this quite recently and had comletely forgotten this story).
Gibbon Chapter XXVIII: The Destruction of Paganism, and Worship of Relics and Saints by Christians
Whoniversaries 15 August: Reign of Terror #2, The Shadow of the Scourge
None that grabbed me.
ii) broadcast anniversary
15th August 1964: broadcast of "Guests of Madame Guillotine", the second episode of the story we now call The Reign of Terror. The Doctor narrowly escapes both the burning barn and a forced labour gang; Ian, Susan and Barbara are imprisoned in the Coniergerie, and, as the epsiode ends, Susan and Barbara are taken off for the chop…
iii) date specified in canon
15th August 2003: The Seventh Doctor, Ace and Bernice Summerfield visit the Pinehill Crest Hotel in Kent which is hosting three very different events: a cross-stitch convention, an experiment in time travel and… the summoning of the Scourge. (Big Finish audio play, The Shadow of the Scourge, October 2000.)
Ballynoe Stone Circle
We went to Tyrella beach yesterday, and I remembered that it is practically within spitting distance of Ballynoe Stone Circle, County Down’s rather modest answer to Stonehenge and Avebury.
His mother and grandmother coming to see:
Mysterious cupmarks in one of the stones:
Nobody else there except the cows – and it is easy to find.
August Books 12) Doctor Who Annual 2011
We picked this up, among other treasures, at the Doctor Who shop in east London last week; no editorial credit is given, though 16 pages (of 90) are attributed to Justin Richards, 14 to Oli Smith and six to Trevor Baxendale. Most of the book is rehashing of the stories of the 2010 season of Who, with some reference to previous seasons’ stories, with a few games, mazes, wordsearch, etc. But I want to say a word in favour of Justin Richards’ contribution; my recent reviews of his books have been unenthusiastic, but I think he has three excellent short pieces of original fiction here, a fable about Death on Gallifrey, a detective story set in a museum which is not what it seems, and a brief set of notes on the Weeping Angels, all of which seemed to me somewhat stretching for the book’s ostensible age bracket – and that is not a bad thing. Well worth picking up (at a mere £7.99) for Who fans of any age. Also has instructions for making your own Raggedy Doctor doll.
Whoniversary 14 August: Alexander Armstrong
14th August 1970: birth of Alexander Armstrong, who is the voice of Mr Smith in The Sarah Jane Adventures (since 2007) and also in The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End (Doctor Who, 2008).
(If you were wondering what happened yesterday, I really couldn’t find much – H.G. Wells died on 13 August 1946 but that is stretching the concept of Whoniversaries just too far for me.)
August Books 11) A Town Like Alice, by Nevil Shute
I picked this up last night and really couldn’t put it down. Despite the instinctive racism (against Australian aborigines and Japanese, though the Malays get off rather better) and the resounding endorsement of Shute’s firmly conservative values, I found Jean Paget a fascinating character – survivor and leader of a group of prisoners in Malaya during the second world war, then pursuing the man she loves and thought was dead to his home in Australia, then when she finds his home town is not the sort of place she wants to spend the rest of her life, she decides to turn it into the sort of place she wants to spend the rest of her life, basically by using her unexpectedly inherited fortune to create a local economy based on employing the local young women. Shute is not exactly a progressive writer, but Jean Paget surely counts as a feminist protagonist even though not written by a feminist author; she challenges and to a certain extent gets around gender roles, particularly in the constrained social environment of 1940’s Australia. Even if she does win all her wars, she suffers enough setbacks in the process to keep our sympathy, all told in Shute’s crystal-clear, direct prose. I really enjoyed it.
August Books 10) A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
When I first read this I didn’t know Vinge’s work all that well, and now I’ve read a few more of his books I can spot some of the standard elements – viewpoint characters who are young or even children, dark ill-explained conspiracies in the background, slightly deus ex machina ending. But what makes this book special is the alien Tines, a lovely concept of packs of four to eight dog-like aliens with mini-hive minds, and the political economy of what happens to their pre-industrial culture when two different factions rescue children off a crashed earth ship and start developing human technology to try and defeat each other with. (This is in the context of a bigger galactic power game, whose details I really failed to grasp, affecting the rescue ship.) It goes on a bit for what is in it, but generally a good read; I much preferred it to the prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, which also won the Hugo several years later.
A Fire Upon The Deep shared the Hugo with Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book (which I personally preferred) and beat KSR’s Red Mars, which is on my current reading list, Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang, which is somewhere on the to-read shelves, and Steel Beach by John Varley, which I haven’t otherwise heard of. More remarkable perhaps is the absence of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, surely at least as important a book as any of the above, from any of the short lists.
August Books 9) Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, by David Day
I picked this up pretty cheap in Chapters a couple of years ago, and I’m glad I didn’t pay too much for it. As an encyclopedia of Middle-Earth it doesn’t hold a candle to Foster’s Complete Guide