I have no idea why I put this on my Bookmooch list – possibly as a mistake for Janet Soskice’s Sisters of Sinai – but it arrived last week. It’s a rather pale reflection of Illuminatus! and Midnight’s Children, set in and around the Holy Land (the original, not the district in South Belfast) in the early 20th century. Extra coloration of various characters’ background is brought in from Cambridge University, Albania and Ireland, none of it very convincing in detail (bad luck I suppose that I know all three of those locations reasonably well). The main strand of a confused plot concerns an ancient Biblical manuscript which supposedly disproves everything in both Old and New Testaments. (*rolls eyes*) The writing is not as funny as the author obviously thinks it is. It filled out the spaces for me while travelling and that is the best I can say for it.

Thanks, everyone, for your immensely helpful comments on my previous post. It is clear to me from the discussion that there are only two serious reservations about Android, and since I do not intend to increase my current number of sexual partners, only one of those two really matters: its ability to talk to my employers’ Microsoft Exchange server. I need it to synchronise accurately not only emails but also calendar, contacts and notes. Does anyone have any further experience of doing this?

(Suggestions to the effect that I stop using Microsoft Exchange may risk getting you de-friended and banned. If I had a choice about it I wouldn’t be asking the question in this way.)

12th August 1947: birth of John Nathan Turner, producer of Doctor Who for the last nine seasons of the classic run, starting with the Fourth Doctor’s final season and continuing for the whole of the last three Doctors of Old Who. Controversial and colourful, like him or loathe him, nobody can dispute the depth of his influence on the show.

12th August 2003: death of Anne Tirard, who played Locusta the poisoner in The Romans (1965) and the Seeker in The Ribos Operation (1978).

births and deaths

11th August 1922: birth of Ron Grainer, who composed the Doctor Who theme tune. According to the lore, he was so gobsmacked by Delia Derbyshire’s electronic arrangement of the music that he asked her, “Did I really write this?” “Most of it,” she replied. Of course he got the on-screen credit and she didn’t.

11th August 1932: birth of John Gorrie, director of The Keys of Marinus (1964) and the third episode of The Reign of Terror (1964)

11th August 1994: death of Peter Cushing, who played Doctor Who in Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966), and much else besides.

11th August 1996: death of Derek Newark, who played caveman Za in An Unearthly Child (1963) and engineer Greg Sutton in Inferno (1970).

• girl quits job on dry erase board exposes farmville boss called her hopa theCHIVE
  I don't know if this is genuine but it's too good not to share
  (tags: life work)
• Darwin, C. R. 'This is the Question Marry Not Marry' [Memorandum on marriage]. (7.1838) CUL-DAR210.8.2
  Charles Darwin on marriage (hat-tip to Steve)
  (tags: life)

Any views?

i) births and deaths

10th August 1929: birth of Peter Diamond, who was fight arranger for eight stories between The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) and The Dæmons (1971), and played a number of minor parts of which the most important was Delos in The Romans (1965).

10th August 1939: birth of Kate O’Mara, who played the Rani in The Mark of the Rani (1985) and Time and the Rani (1987). Persistent rumours that she (or at least her character) might reappear in New Who have so far proven unfounded.

10th August 1996: death of Rex Tucker, who directed The Gunfighters (1966) but had also been an important force behind the scenes of the creation of Doctor Who in 1963. Following a dispute with Innes Lloyd his credit as producer was excised from episode 4 of The Gunfighters, so the on-screen evidence of his contribution to the show is even slimmer.

ii) broadcast anniversary

10th August 1968: broadcast of episode 1 of The Dominators, the earliest start for any full Doctor Who season. The Doctor, Jamie, and new companion Zoe land on an island on the planet Dulkis; so do two sinister Dominators, Toba and Rago, with their robot servants, the Quarks; so do a group of young Dulkians led by Cully, who sees the Dominators casually kill off his friends and then tries to get help. At the end of the episode, the Quarks ask permission to destroy the Doctor and Jamie…

It’s really extraordinary to think that a book this influential was written by a teenager – is there any other similar case in the history of literature? It’s a bit uneven structurally – the nested stories are a bit of a mess, and the dialogue sometimes sounds like a bunch of young but very earnest intellectuals sitting indoors during a dull Swiss holiday – but the central thrust of the narrative, Frankenstein giving life to his creature which then goes on the rampage, is deeply compelling.

It is a long time since I last read this, and I had forgotten a number of interesting points: that Frankenstein’s original betrayal of his creature is right after he animates it, when he runs away; that Frankenstein attempts to create a female version of it in, of all places, Scotland (the Orkney Islands, to be precise); the interlude with Felix, Agatha, Safie and the old man in Germany; the detailed account of the geography of the surroundings of Geneva and to a lesser extent England (compare the much vaguer descriptions of Ingolstadt and Ireland); and the ending – I had the idea that the creature fled to a hidden Arctic city, but perhaps I was thinking of Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound.

I had also forgotten how much dialogue Frankenstein’s creature gets. This is really important because the story is about families, and the creature’s isolation when rejected by Frankenstein, its ‘father’, resulting in its murderous resentment. It encounters two sets of extended families in the story – the Frankensteins, and Felix and Agatha’s household – and is excluded, cruelly if for understandable reasons, from both. (NB the the framing narrative is also a family one, letters from Walton to his sister.) No wonder its sole demand of Frankenstein is to create a soul-mate. I’m not aware that any cinematic adaptation manages to generate as much sympathy for the creature as Shelley’s original.

The other key figure is of course Frankenstein, who starts off as a keen if naïve scholar, unifying old lore and new science to create wonders, and then spends the rest of the book wrestling with his conscience over the consequences of his actions. Although he is the first-person narrator for most of the book, and unlike the creature doesn’t actually kill anyone, it’s much more difficult to feel sympathy for him as he tries to evade his responsibility, both to his biological family and to his creation.

I should love to read a biography of Mary Shelley, to see where she got these fairly vivid models of human misbehaviour from. (Wikipedia suggests it was direct observation of Percy, but that seems too easy.)

Anyway, it’s a quick read, and in places a surprising one, and if you have any interest in the sf genre it is a hugely important book.

i) births and deaths

9th August 1920: birth of Graham Leaman who played four roles in five Old Who stories: the captive Controller in The Macra Terror (1967), Price the communications office in Fury from the Deep (1968), the Grand Marshall of the Ice Warriors in The Seeds of Death (1969), and an un-named Time Lord in Colony in Space (1971) and The Three Doctors (1973).

9th August 1931: birth of Alethea Charlton who plays Hur in An Unearthly Child (1963) and Edith in The Time Meddler (1965).

9th August 1953: birth of Roberta Tovey who plays Dr. Who’s granddaughter Susan Who in the two Peter Cushing films, and also recorded a justly forgotten single, “Who’s Who”.

9th August 1978: birth of Daniela Denby-Ashe, who plays ‘Mary’, the alien who seduces Toshiko in Greeks Bearing Gifts (Torchwood, 2006)

ii) webcast anniversary

9th August 2002: webcast release of the second episode of Real Time, in which one of the scientists has been transformed into a Cyberman and they all try to acquire the Tardis.

Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000, which was the year this, his best known novel, was published in English; most of his work had been available in Swedish since the early 1990s, which may explain why the Nobel committee got to him before much of the English-speaking world did.

Soul Mountain is a story of an unnamed narrator exploring China, in search of the mythical mountain of the title, also telling himself the story of a pair of lovers (“you” and “she”) on a similar journey. It rather lacks a plot; it’s a series of vignettes of encounters with the legacies of the Cultural Revolution, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and other aspects of Chinese historical experience, with a sense that the storyteller is trying to reintegrate a shattered sense of self from the debris of China’s traumas.

Because of the lack of structure, and the style of writing, I found it tough going (though I’ve seen the translation criticised for not conveying Gao’s meaning properly). I got much more out of Wild Swans.

As I prepare my Whoniversary posts, I’ve been noting the dates of broadcast of Doctor Who stories over the years. Not very surprisingly, they are distributed very unevenly around the calendar.

Not totally sure of the counts there but the overall picture is clear: heavy concentration in the colder months of the year (in the British climate), very little in the summer. There are 48 days on which no Doctor Who (or spinoff) episode has been broadcast, and 21 are in August and 16 in July. The longest run of such dates is 2-7 August inclusive (also 26-31 July if you don’t count the 27 July 2008 Proms concert). On the other hand there’s a complete run of 169 days (170 if it’s a leap year) from 28 December to 14 June inclusive when every day is a broadcast Who anniversary, and another run later in the year of 56 days from 25 October to 19 December.

For Old Who, there are seven dates which saw the original broadcasts of Doctor Who episodes in six different years:

I had forgotten that the demises of Adric and the Fifth Doctor were precisely two years apart.

For New Who, the winning date is 25th December, Christmas Day, which has seen five specials (The Christmas Invasion in 2005, The Runaway Bride in 2006, Voyage of the Damned in 2007, The Next Doctor in 2008 and The End of Time #1 in 2009). Add to that "The Feast of Steven" / The Daleks’ Master Plan #7, and it gets up to six as well. 

If you add together all incarnations of Who including Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures, 22nd October also joins the list of dates which have had six episodes first broadcast over the years: The Tenth Planet #3 (1966); The Invisible Enemy #4 (1977); the first two episodes of Torchwood, Everything Changes and Day One (2006); Warriors of Kudlak #2 (Sarah Jane Adventures, 2007); and The Mad Woman in the Attic #1 (Sarah Jane Adventures, 2009).

But that also gives you one day of the year which on which seven episodes of Doctor Who and the spinoffs have been broadcast for the first time. That day is 1st January, and the episodes are "Volcano" / The Daleks’ Master Plan #8 (1966); Day of the Daleks #1 (1972); The Face of Evil #1 (1977); the Sarah Jane Adventures pilot, Invasion of the Bane (2007); the two last episodes of the first series of Torchwood, Captain Jack Harkness and End of Days (also 2007), and of course The End of Time #2 (2010) where we bade farewell to David Tennant and heard Matt Smith say ‘Geronimo!’

Well, I hope you appreciate that. It amused me on a wet Sunday afternoon.

Mostly about Theodosius: “capital punishment was inflicted on the Audians, or Quartodecimans, who should dare to perpetrate the atrocious crime of celebrating on an improper day the festival of Easter.”

i) births and deaths

8th August 1930: birth of Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, writer of The Daleks (1963-64), The Keys of Marinus (1964), The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), The Chase (1965), Mission to the Unknown (1965), The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66, with Dennis Spooner who always claimed to have done most of the work), Planet of the Daleks (1973), Death to the Daleks (1974), Genesis of the Daleks (1975), The Android Invasion (1976) and Destiny of the Daleks (1979), as well as the Peter Cushing films Doctor Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD (1966). Not to mention Blake’s 7. A couple of years ago, a woman who I had just hired to work in my office spotted that I was a Doctor Who fan, and told me that she had grown up close to Nation in Kent, and had actualy played with the “real” Daleks as a child. If she had put that on her application letter, we could have skipped the rest of the interviewing process. (She has long since gone on to greater things.)

ii) broadcast anniversaries

8th August 1964: broadcast of “A Land of Fear”, first episode of the story we now call The Reign of Terror. The Tardis lands in a quiet wood and the Doctor relents slightly from kicking Ian and Barbara off the Tardis; the team goes off to explore and enter an abandoned farmhouse. They realise that they have landed in Revolutionary France; the Doctor is knocked unconscious and the other three are captured by revolutionary militia, who set the building on fire as they leave, the Doctor trapped inside…

8th August 1985: broadcast of episodes 3 and 4 of Slipback on BBC radio. Peri lands safely on a pair of detectives, with whom she bickers for the next two episodes. Meanwhile the Doctor bickers with the computer for two episodes. And Eric Saward still thinks he is Douglas Adams.

Ow ow ow!

Reviving my 16th-century history project, I come to this interesting first-person account by the man appointed to rule Ireland by Elizabeth I in 1565–1571 and again in 1575–1578. Let’s bear in mind that in the last hundred years only Bertie Ahern, W.T. Cosgrave and Éamon de Valera (and, stretching a point, Augustine Birrell) have run the Irish government for longer than that, so he demonstrated considerable staying power. In 1583 he wrote a long account of his public life to Sir Francis Walsingham, who was the queen’s Principal Secretary and whose son was about to marry his daughter. It is almost all about his time in Ireland, and in a decent introduction 39 pages, followed by 69 of the main text) Ciarán Brady offers a decent contextualisation of the details, including helpfully pointing out the relatively few instances where Sidney has improved upon the actual facts.

What struck me was that Sidney clearly portrays his mission as one of getting the Irish chieftains to live peacefully under the English crown; and that by his account the problem was the peaceful bit rather than the crown bit. He still wanted to destroy the most powerful alternative power centres. Shane O’Neill actually was killed, and his head sent to Dublin Castle ‘pickled in a pipkin’, as Sidney memorably puts it. He was unable to dislodge the influence of the Earl of Ormond, who was related to the queen through her mother, and so was able to short-circuit the official lines of communication by asking his cousin to curb her annoying bureaucrats.

But there is no question in Sidney’s mind, or in his account in the Irish chieftains’ minds, that they will work out a relationship with the queen’s government in Dublin; the only issue is how long it will take. He has an account of the honest gentry, nobility and business community of Cork beseeching his help for them to "become English, and accordingly to live under English law, and by the same to be defended, each weaker from his stronger neighbour". Of course, Sidney would say that, wouldn’t he; and it has unfortunate overtones of Terence O’Neill’s infamous statement that "if you give Roman Catholics a good job and a good house, they will live like Protestants because they will see neighbours with cars and television sets; they will refuse to have eighteen children". But it’s interesting because Sidney is actually identified by many historians – including , as he happily admits, Ciarán Brady, the editor of this book – as a key initiator of the policy of colonisation and dispossession which eventually did win the day, rather than of good government and assimilation. There’s little evidence of that from his own account.

Sidney also had a couple of economic policies: he banned the export of unspun wool, so as to boost the native Irish spinning industry; he tried to regulate trade in wine, obviously to boost government revenues but also to promote economic development in the ports which were permitted to import; and he bemoaned the reversal of these policies by his short-termist successors (who he hints were bribed to do so). He has a couple of curious blind spots as well; there’s an anecdote about the difficulty of English officials dealing with Irish-speakers in the administration of justice (in which the day is saved by his bête noir, the Earl of Ormond); he also negotiated with a couple of Catholic bishops who are keen to get royal endorsement as well, implying that he thinks this could have been worked out in the end. There’s a nice note of his meeting with the pirate queen, ‘Grany I’Malley’. And he refers to my ancestor, Nicholas White, on just one page, portraying him as Ormond’s man (but ‘honest’) on a three-man commission dealing with the administration of Munster.

Not really a book for anyone who is not already fairly well-read in sixteenth-century Ireland, but a fascinating primary source.

births and deaths

7th August 1924: birth of Kenneth Kendall, who appeared as a newsreader in The War Machines (1966), the first celebrity to portray himself on Doctor Who (unless you count the Beatles).

7th August 1952: birth of Alexei Sayle, who plays the DJ in Revelation of the Daleks (1986). ‘Allo John, got a new motor? Is there life on Mars? Is there life in Peckham?

7th August 1999: death of Ric Felgate who played Roy Stone (the American reporter) in The War Machines (1966), Brent (Ms Kelly’s assistant) in The Seeds of Death (1969) and Van Lyden (the astronaut sent to look for the others) in The Ambassadors of Death (1970)

I see that the German Marshall Fund is offering a prize for a 2500 word essay on the future of the transatlantic relationship. Essays must ostensibly be by a joint team of one North American and one European, however defined, both under 30. Registration of entrants by 15 August (ie end of next week), essay deadline is in November. Prize is €2500 each. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as we used to say back home.

births and deaths

6th August 1945: birth of Ron Jones, who directed Black Orchid (1982), Time-Flight (1982), Arc of Infinity (1983), Frontios (1984), Vengeance on Varos (1985) and Mindwarp (1986).

Sarah Beauhall is a blacksmith living in modern Seattle, who is grappling a) with the fact that her favourite sword turns out to be a relic from the Norse mythos, pursued by dwarves and dragons, and b) with her own relationship with her girlfriend. It’s not the first urban fantasy I’ve read set in the Pacific North-West – ‘s Walker Papers series are also set there, though her central character is a police mechanic swept into a combination of Celtic and Native American myth. Oddly enough the last fiction I read outside my self-set reading lists was also sfnal, also set in Seattle, and also had a title whose first word was “Black”.

Black Blade Blues is not terribly profound, and probably won’t win any awards. But I thoroughly enjoyed it: Sarah getting to grips with the sword and Katie, and the dragon in pursuit of both, in the context of the Renaissance Faire / SCA subculture of the states of Washington and Oregon, makes a cracking good yarn, with groundwork laid for more books to come – which I will certainly try and get. If you’re not sure if you like urban fantasy, this is not a bad place to start; if you do like it, you’ll probably like this.

Dame Rosalind Marsden has been appointed as the next EU Special Representative for Sudan, and is the first woman ever to be appointed as an EUSR. The current 11 EUSRs are listed here, and the previous 23, with variable formatting, here. Oh well, 35th time lucky, eh?

This was a five-part series first broadcast on radio in 2007. I’ve seen a couple of other reviews on the web which were distinctly underwhelmed, but I rather enjoyed it. The title character is a museum attendant who gets swept into a search for the Lux Ater, the Book of Black Light, which will provide a link between string theory and alchemy, at the behest of 400-year-old alchemist Nikolai, who steps out of one of the paintings in the museum. Other incidental characters include Oneira’s odious boyfriend who spends most of the sequence reduced to a bucket of water and able to communicate only by farting gurgles. There are some sophisticated jokes about philosophy and some nice one-liners.

The episode titles are 1) The Big Chill (featuring a mutating fridge), 2) Sleight of Mind, featuring the powers of the electric company, 3) A String of Time, featuring Philip K. Dick and Roger Bacon, 4) The Thing with Two Cappuccinos, with a horde of android baristas, and 5) Mind the Gap, where Oneira spends most of the episode talking to herself. I had not previously heard of the author, Robert Easby, or of either of the two leads, Lindsay Marshall as Oneira and Peter Marinka as Nikolai, but they all impressed me and I shall look out for them in future. Not quite as profound as perhaps it aspired to be, but I enjoyed it.
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One of those ideas that seems so obvious once someone else does it:

(Hat-tip to . Watch especially for Anne Francis and the anachronistic but appropriate clip from New Who)

i) births and deaths

5th August 1935: birth of Wanda Ventham, who played Jean Rock in The Faceless Ones (1967), Thea Ransome and the Fendahl Core in Image of the Fendahl (1977) and Faroon in Time and the Rani (1987), a nice regular spacing of her appearances over the decades. Incidentally, her son, Benedict Cumberbatch, is currently starring in the title role of Steven Moffat’s Sherlock.

5th August 1968: birth of Matt Jones, author of TV stories The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (Doctor Who, 2006) and Dead Man Walking (Torchwood, 2008), as well as the excellent Bernice Summerfield story Beyond The Sun (novel, 1997; audio play, 1998).

5th August 1973: birth of Paul Kasey, who has played literally dozens of short monsters in New Who and its spinoffs, and has appeared in more New Who episodes than anyone except David Tennant and Billie Piper.

Last but by no means least, 5th August 1978 saw the birth of Brian Minchin, script editor for the first two series of Torchwood and for eight episodes of New Who, assistant producer of Torchwood: Children of Earth last year, and producer of the next series of Sarah Jane Adventures. He is also my first cousin. Happy birthday, Brian!

ii) cinematic anniversary

5th August 1966: general cinema release date of Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 AD, starring Peter Cushing as human scientist Dr. Who and guest starring Bernard Cribbins as police constable Tom Campbell. It is a rather cut-down version of The Dalek Invasion of Earthhere. We have previously debated the correct anniversary.