Yet another book on religion where I basically agree with the author but found the book itself really unsatisfactory.

Basically, McGrath seemed to me to be asking the wrong question. His argument identifies “atheism” as a collective identity more than is really warranted by his own evidence; towards the end he seems to almost criticize atheists for not being as well organised as the Church, which sort of misses the point. More widely, he never makes it clear whose atheism or belief is under discussion, though I felt that in the present day he really just means Oxford dons. Non-Christian faiths are barely mentioned; there is an anecdote about the triumph of Christianity in Korea in the 20th century which simply does not refer to other religions practised by Koreans. This really isn’t good enough.

The internal structure puzzled me as well. I would have preferred a more strictly chronological organisation. But instead we have a chapter on Feuerbach, Marx and Freud, followed by one on the sciences post-Darwin, followed by an examination of atheism in classic literature from the Enlightenment on (that last being one of the better chapters in the book). It is as if Freud knew nothing of Darwin, and Darwin knew nothing of Keats. (I confess I had not preeviously heard of Feuerbach, but that may just be my ignorance.)

Other irritations: James II was not Charles II’s son (p 14). I was surprised to read (p 264-265) that “The role of religion in creating and sustaining communal identity has been known for some considerable time, and has become increasingly important since about 1965”; I think it’s just possible that religion played an important role in creating and sustaining communal identity for quite a long time prior to that date.

I suspect that this book was intended to be in part a rebuttal to Richard Dawkins, who is very briefly dissected, but unfortunately it is too full of its own complacency to be effective.

A few weeks back I confessed my ignorance of Neal Barrett, jr, who has been named this year’s Author Emeritus by the SFWA. I’m generally prepared to expand my horizons, so ordered a couple of his books from Bookmooch and read them in transit this weekend. I have to say that my ignorance has been replaced by some puzzlement; I did not think that either of these was a particularly good book. I hope that his other work has demonstrated the excellence that SFWA has chosen to honour, but there is little sign of it from what I’ve read.

April Books 23) Stress Pattern

A story of a bloke who crashes on an alien planet where strange creatures live, some of them formed by his own thoughts and desires. (Solaris meets “A Martian Odyssey” only nothing like as good.) His fantasy woman is created for him and it doesn’t work out. Only 160 pages, thank God.

April Books 24) Judge Dredd (the book-of-the-film)

I’ve never more than skimmed 2000 AD but was aware of the basic set-up of Dredd’s world; I have not seen the 1996 movie starring Silvester Stallone. Difficult to, er, judge what Barrett’s input to the final product is (he did not write the screenplay) but I felt that I missed the broad sweep of scene-setting which is necessary in a novelisation of this kind; no real sense of landscape or background. There are some nice inserts from a future historian commenting on the story as past history, including one (perhaps despairing?) piece near the end complaining that it is all made up. Barrett also wrote the novelisations for the Dungeons and Dragons movie and Barb Wire, but I will not rush to acquire either.

There must surely be numerous other authors of similar prominence and age to Barrett who would qualify as Authors Emeriti (or Emeritæ). Maybe I was just unlucky; I will concede that a book’s availability from Bookmooch may not be a good indicator of quality.

This is one of the better academic books about Who that I have read. Hills is a sympathetic fan and also a media studies lecturer in Cardiff. In this book he has sensibly not tried to provide a global guide to Who, but instead has taken a small number of (big) issues and tried to illuminate them in detail. Looking mainly at New Who up to early 2009, he basically has seven things that he wants to say and takes a chapter to say each of them:

1) New Who is strongly authored (by RTD and now Moffatt) which makes it very different from Old Who; NB though that the credit for this authoring is shared by others (notably Phil Collinson and the BBC’s upper hierarchy)
2) New Who’s writers are themselves long-term Who fans; but this does not mean that they have a harmonious relationship with the fan base.
3) Time travel, though obviously central to Who, is not really used in an sfnal way in New Who (the weakest of the chapters, I thought)
4) Monsters are even more central to New Who, both as spectacle and as moral lessons.
5) New Who cannot clearly be categorised as ‘quality’ or as ‘non-quality’ TV (includes a very interesting passage on how Christopher Ecclestone’s comments on the show undermined RTD’s attempts to mark it as ‘quality’).
6) Murray Gold is one of the key creators of New Who (also the occasional use of pop songs in the show is mildly interesting).
7) New Who has managed to become both ‘cult’ and “mainstream’ (NB this is quite a different distinction to ‘quality’/’non-quality’).

I thought the two best sections were on Christopher Ecclestone and Murray Gold, but there is lots more here too.

By writing this book, Hills appears to have hoped to update Tulloch and Alvarado, but I think has done a better job. It’s not quite as magisterial as the Time and Relative Dimensions in Space collection (to which Hills contributed the chapter on Big Finish) but way better than the books I’ve read on Who by Robb, Newman, Chapman, Couch, etc.

I was a bit annoyed at first at yet another book which banishes footnotes to the end – why, with 21st-century typesetting technology, is this still considered an acceptable way to publish? – but fortunately most of the footnotes are simply references to other work, most of which I have already read (though I am still irritated by the handful that do have substantive content, marooned hundreds of pages from the statements they are illuminating). So that turns out to be a minor gripe.

This is a better effort than the previous annual, though we still have the irritation of “Dr Who” addressing Jamie and Zoe as “my children” and a couple of stories that seem to have been written with Hartnell in mind. But the art is a significant improvement, particularly the first of the two comic strip stories (which sadly leaves Zoe in the Tardis for most of the action). Only eight text stories this time, and they are all pretty standard landing-on-alien-planets stuff, though we are offered a completely different explanation of what happened to the Marie Celeste to that seen in The Chase five years earlier – the crew get abducted by aliens and die horribly when the Doctor is unable to save them. The usual mix of science and history articles includes a rather odd three pages on UFOs which seems to take them entirely seriously. All the stories feature Jamie and Zoe but one of the games for some reason has Jamie and Victoria.

A great work, of course, about mass hysteria, groupthink, and evil. The editor notes in the foreword that for today’s audience the McCarthy hearings, which were on his mind as he wrote, actually require more explanation than the Salem witch trials, which have been given a new lease of historical consciousnes largely by Miller’s play; which is kind of ironic. There are some powerful scenes but I didn’t find any standout quotes that lingered; the whole is greater than the parts. My edition includes also a deleted Act 2 Scene 2 set outside in the woods between Proctor and Abigail which makes their relationship more explicit, but I think it works better dramatically to leave that exposition to Act 4.

Despite having worked my way through the complete Shakespeare a year and a half ago, I’m still not great at visualising plays from scripts as I read them, so I hope I can find a screen version of this some time. Miller repeatedly breaks into his own script to give pen-profiles of a number of the characters, which helps to get a sense of how they might appear on stage, but almost all of the characters for whom he does this are male, even though the women are at least as interesting as the men if not more so. In particular this meant I had difficulty telling the teenage girls apart, and I expect I would have no difficulty in doing so in a theatrical production.

This Rebus novel got rave reviews in a couple of places, but I was not completely satisfied with it. It seemed more a novel of gangland politics than of police investigation; there is a horribly bungled police raid at one point which emphasises the relative powerlessness of the keepers of law in this story. There is a character who is a Bosnian woman victim of sex trafficking, but I felt that crucial details of her background didn’t mesh with what little I know of that issue. There are two fairly dramatic crimes – a hit-and-run car accident involving Rebus’ daughter, and another character found hanging (hence the title of the book), but both of these crimes turned out to be a little bathetic in their resolution. The subplot about war criminal escaping from post-1945 France and Gemany was not really concluded (except with paranoia agaist the British establishment, which may or may not be well founded). It does score well on the reintroduction of Rebus’ relationships with his own family and, to an extent, with himself now that he is giving up alcohol. But I find it difficult to believe the somewhat anarchic working environment that he experiences. Probably I am wrong and simply imagine incorrectly that most people at that level of responsibility have and keep regular office hours. So only three points out of five on LibraryThing for this one.

…or could it be that there has been some editing of the code which reclassified Pirate Party supporters?

(And my own rather rare choice has not been showing up on friends’ posts much.)

This is a Tenth Doctor and Martha novel, set on a wilderness world where a crazed scientist and his family are holding out against a monstrous creature which is devouring the planet’s entire surface, helped by a domestic computer (which is also derganged). I thought it was a pretty poor effort. I hate cute robots, and this book has too many of them; Magrs is self-conscious in his writing down to the presumed young reader’s level, and the prose style is pretty awful; his characterisation of the Doctor is annoying and inconsistent; and the monster is called, I kid you not, the Voracious Craw. One to skip. (I think I got it for 50p on eBay.)

There’s been a lot of buzz around this book, partly perhaps because of the author’s online visibility, but mainly I suspect because it is a rather good book. It is an immersive fantasy, to use the Mendlesohn typology, about Yeine, a young woman who discovers that she is a potential heir to the rulership of the entire world, and who has to grapple with palace politics and living deities to survive. The political situation is actually rather well set up, and the denouement is rather a twist in the plot but is actually entirely fair to the reader rather than deus ex machina. This will no doubt appear on a number of next year’s shortlists, and desrvedly so; it’s not my preferred sub-genre, but I enjoyed it.

I think this is my favourite of the Chrestomanci novels, a prequel with some retracing the steps of Charmed Life, but adding some extra wrinkles which I found more satisfying – the parental marriage disintegrating; the young goddess of cats; the boarding school; the interdimensional smuggling racket; and the answer to the question of what happened to Chrestomanci’s other lives. Young Christopher’s psychological alienation, temptation, and eventual redemption are a very effective story arc. Even though we see even less of the world of Chrestomanci here than we did in Charmed Life, it still feels like a rich and intriguing environment. Like all of the Chrestomanci books it reads perfectly well as a standalone, with no knowledge of the rest of the series necessary to enjoy it.

I am not going into the details of the BHV question, but apparently Leterme has offered the King his resignation after the Liberals pulled the plug (my gut reaction: everyone is being opportunist here). Fortunately, this may mean that parliament fails to vote on the absurd and offensive burqa ban.

In a week when people have been thinking about Iceland for other reasons, it was odd to be reading Njal’s Saga, much of which takes place around the very slopes of Eyjafjallajökull. Though actually I found certain similarities also with my current trip to Africa; Njal’s Saga is in part about modernisation of an agrarian society, and the challenges caused by economic change to traditional patterns of internal conflict resolution. It was recommended to me ages ago by the rarely seen , whose detailed review I strongly recommend; I can’t add a lot more to what she says, except to add my praise for the sparse writing style, the three-dimensional characterisation, the (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to resolve family feuds through law rather than blood, the sense of a small, isolated community which is none the less intimately connected with the rest of the Norse world (one of the set-pieces towards the end is the Battle of Clontarf). Tremendous stuff.

I mentioned the subtle invocation of the Third and Tenth Doctors by the first Labour election spot last week; the latest one is introduced by Peter Davison, who is the only named speaker, and again closed out by David Tennant. As Nick Barlow says, one almost expects them to tell us that there’s a hole in the economy the exact size of Belgium.

• : Volcanic ash: the UK Independence Party weighs in
  Charlemagne fisks a UKIP press release:

  Eurocontrol is not an EU agency, it was not Eurocontrol that ordered the closure of Europe's skies, the closure did not follow a single computer simulation and EU regulations will not oblige airlines to pay the costs of passengers stranded by the ash cloud. Or, to put it more briefly, out of four factual assertions in the UKIP press release, four are incorrect.

  (tags: eu)
• : Is volcanic ash really a political question?
  in which Charlemagne says No Comment at some length
  (tags: climatechange)

Latest rumours to reach me here in Africa are that Sinn Féin are to pull out of the election in South Belfast, in order to strengthen the chances of Alasdair McDonnell of the SDLP holding the seat and also to up the pressure on the SDLP to stand down in Fermanagh and South Tyrone where the Unionists have agreed a joint candidate.

This certainly changes McDonnell’s position from exceedingly vulnerable to rather more comfortable. I don’t, however, imagine that the SDLP are likely to return the favour by withdrawing star candidate Fearghal McKinney in Fermanagh-South Tyrone.

As with Flashforward, I haven’t seen a single episode of Dollhouse so wondered how much entertainment I would get from the Hugo-nominated final episode of the first series, “Epitaph One” (which was apparently never actually broadcast in the US). Not a lot, is the answer. I had no idea of the significance of the space found by the fugitives in 2019; there was no real plot resolution, just setting up (I suppose) more plot for the second series; and there simply was not enough Eliza Dushku. I shall re-watch the three nominated Doctor Who stories before making a final judgement, but I suspect that this is going fifth on my ballot.

Given my travels it took me a couple of days to catch up with this one. Also since my net access has been weak since Saturday evening, I’ve managed to remain largely unspoiled.

I see fan opinion has been a bit mixed on this. I rather liked it. I have no objections to remodelling the Daleks. I am the sort of person who has difficulty in telling the difference between different types of car, and do not credit myself with any fashion sense whatever, but the new version looks to me more substantial and perhaps evil. In my rewatch of Old Who I’m about to hit the most fundamental redesign before this, that of the Cybermen in The Invasion, and I feel this one may have a similar impact.

Still less do I mind the Moffatt/Gatiss idea of actually giving the Daleks a narrative and some sense of continuity. Under RTD the Daleks always seemed to be utterly destryoed and then coming back again for more, rather like the Master in almost every story after Delgado. I think it is rather good that the Doctor explicitly realises that the story is not yet over for them.

I liked the explicit reference to Power of the Daleks and to Philip K. Dick’s classic short story “Imposter” (that last giving Amy her moment of awesome humanity over the Doctor). And a small note, but one where this episode scored over last week’s: Gatiss, unlike Moffatt, seems to be able to dial down the British patriotism even in episodes about the Coronation or Winston Churchill.

But I was not completely satisfied. An RTD who story like this would have been crammed with incident and Significance. This season’s shows seem less heavily laden, less emotionally charged, which overall is a relief but sometimes leaves me feeling that the result could have been mroe substantial.

This is minor stuff compared to what others are going through, I realise, but I am going to tell you about it anyway. My flight from Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) to Juba (Sudan) failed to take off yesterday; the plane had come in about half an hour late from Djibouti and that made it too late for them to get back from Juba to Addis before dark.

So we were all booked into a decent enough hotel and given dinner vouchers etc, and warned to be ready for aq 0730 departure this morning. I woke up at 1 am and couldn’t get back to sleep.

At 4 am they called and said the flight will be further delayed, so we should stay put. Aaargh. I shall try and get some sleep now.

Looking ahead, I do hope that the air has cleared sufficiently by the weekend for me to get home form Africa on something like the original schedule…

The Eighth Doctor Adventures, having tried vampires a bit earlier, now switch to werewolves – though werewolves on a distant planet which is being exploited by ruthless industrialists trying to turn it into a tourist resort. The werewolf bits are memorably nasty and scary; there is a somewhat clichéd but basically endearing tough cop who has to work out the mystery and also what the Doctor and Sam are doing; I wasn’t totally convinced by the political set-up, or by the handling of the climaxes of either half of the book. But if you like Doctor Who and you like werewolf stories you’ll probably like this one.

Connie Willis has won more Hugo awards for fiction than any other writer (and more Nebulas than anyone except Ursula Le Guin), and I’m not entirely sure why. Her best stories have a decent combination of humour and nostalgic mourning; her worst are sentimental glurge. This particular collection includes two of her four joint Hugo/Nebula winning stories – “The Last of the Winnebagos” and “Even The Queen”, both of which are decent enough; I found some of the others pretty incomprehensible (especially the last in the collection, “At The Rialto”) or shallow. Some of them are OK (best being “Jack”, a story of a vampire during the Blitz), and the collection probably represents Willis at the peak of her powers – for good or ill.

Maureen O'Brien is known to discerning Who fans as Vicki, the first ever 'new' companion to join Doctor Who after the series began. She is also the author of a series of seven detective novels about London policeman John Bright, which started in 1989 with Close Up On Death and finished (for now) in 2004 with Every Step You Take. This is the sixth in the series, and takes Bright and his girlfriend Jude to the French Jura to get away from the stress of his most recent case. The lover of the owner of their hotel is gruesomely murdered, Bright himself becomes a suspect in the eyes of the local police, and Jude is faced with even worse problems. I thought this was exceptionally good. We really get into the heads of the two main characters, negotiating a new and fairly brittle relationship against the background of his job and the French holiday which is intended to bring them together but does not have that effect. There is a major plot twist about two-thirds of the way through which I really did not see coming. O'Brien's writing is as gripping as Ian Rankin's, and sexier. I shall start looking out for the other books in the series.

A while back I noted the awful Langbehn-Pond case, where a dying woman’s partner was kept from her bedside by a Florida hospital; attempts to sue the hospital for discrimination eventually failed. The story is dreadful and the hospital’s conduct simply indefensible morally – as the judge pointed out in his summing-up:

the defendants’ lack of sensitivity and attention to Ms.Langbehn, Ms. Pond, and their children caused them needless distress during a time of vulnerability. The defendants’ failure to provide Ms. Langbehn and her children frequent updates on Ms. Pond’s status, to allow Ms. Langbehn and her children to visit Ms. Pond after emergency medical care ceased; to inform Ms. Langbehn that Ms. Pond had been transferred to the intensive care unit, and to provide Ms. Langbehn Ms. Pond’s medical records as she requested, exhibited a lack of compassion and was unbecoming of a renowned trauma center like Ryder. Unfortunately, no relief is available for these failures

The actual legal documents are rather chilling – the hospital successfully argued that their duty of care was entirely to the dying woman and not at all to her family, and cited precedents including the following:

In the Middle District of Florida a plaintiff brought a claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress against the United State Bureau of Prisons (“BOP”), to which the court applied Florida law. Gonzalez-Jimenez De Ruiz v. United States, 231 F. Supp.2d 1187 (M.D. Fla. 2002). Plaintiff’s father was being held in a Florida prison, and because of concerns for his father’s health, plaintiff traveled from Puerto Rico to Florida to visit his father. From April until June the prison officials refused to allow plaintiff to visit his father, told plaintiff that his father didn’t wish to see him, and told plaintiff that his father was “fine.” Since at least May, the father was actually in a nearby hospital being treated for terminal cancer. Plaintiff learned of this from a non-prison official and visited the hospital, where he also learned that his father’s spine and neck had been broken by prison personnel who “had crudely attempted to manipulate [his] spine.” The very next day, plaintiff’s father was transferred to a prison in Texas where he died nine days later, all without notification to his family. Thus, for over a month the plaintiff was denied contact with his dying father, was lied to and denied the most basic information about his father’s terminal condition and the condition caused by the BOP personnel, and was not given information about his father’s transfer to Texas and ultimate death. The court held that because the father was in a federal correctional facility the allegations were not “beyond the bounds of decency” or “utterly intolerable in a civilized community,” and dismissed the Complaint.

I would beg to disagree with the court on its definition of “decency” or a “civilised community”; and I hope that Jackson Memorial Hospital is suitably proud to be able to point to this precedent as justification for their behaviour.

Be that as it may, two days ago Janice Langbehn got a slightly unexpected phone call. It was from President Obama, apologising for the way the family had been treated, and informing her that he has directed that all hospitals in receipt of Medicaid or Medicare funds allow equal visitation rights. The family still has had no apology from the hospital, but I think that counts as a victory all the same.

• Shaw on Ulysses
  via Bookslut, George Bernard Shaw's take on Joyce: "I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for such a book, you little know my countrymen."
  (tags: ireland literature)

I have my doubts about the UUP/Conservative narrative, but I have to admit they have been running a good campaign so far; their special election broadcast was rather good (compared to the SDLP’s which was awful). Now they’ve pulled a beautiful stunt on the DUP, which may not get many votes but does get my applause for its chutzpah.

The DUP launched this fairly sober poster a couple of days back:

Of course, the ‘voter’ in the picture is a photographic model whose images are available in a commercial archive. The UUP/Tories therefore used another picture of her for a poster of their own:

Glorious. (Perhaps a little too wordy and cluttered, but the basic point is there.)

(Hat-tip to Unionist blogger "Bobballs", via Slugger O’Toole)

I remain sceptical as to whether the voters of Northern Ireland actually care particularly about electing members of the main Westminster parties, but I admire the way the message is being delivered.

Though in the latest development, it seems that both parties may have breached terms of use for the photographs!

The highest capital cities in the world (eight at over 2000m):

Sucre (Bolivia) 2783m, though seat of govt is La Paz at 3660m
Quito (Ecuador) 2763m
Thimphu (Bhutan) 2736m
Bogota (Colombia) 2619m
Asmara (Eritrea) 2363m
Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) 2362m
Sana‘a (Yemen) 2253m
Mexico City (Mexico) 2216m

Data from here. There’s then quite a jump from Mexico City to the next highest, Kabul (1807m).

Having just arrived in Addis, I wondered what it was that was making me feel more tired than I expected, and also why the weather was rather cooler than I had expected for 9° north of the Equator. Now I know.

(Also I bet there is no really measurable difference in alitude between here and Asmara!)

I read the first in this series, the multiply award-winning Take Back Plenty four years ago, and am now at last catching up with the other two. Seasons of Plenty has the massive spaceship Plenty, commandeered by Tabitha Jute at the end of the previous book, setting off for (with any luck) Proxima Centauri, loaded with many inhabitants of different communities and factions, and also endowed with a certain life of its own. Not a lot actually happens – there is a feeling of setting the scene for the third book, while just travelling from A to B. It’s oddly reminiscent of A Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was reading at the same time, except that Plenty really is a closed social space (which Macondo is not). It’s difficult to imagine such an enterprise being quite as anarchic (or indeed diverse) as Greenland paints it, but if you can swallow that premise it is fun.

I had read this many year ago, but it popped up on one of my various reading lists last week. It’s about a small town called Macondo, founded in the middle of the jungle (though also confusingly near the Caribbean, and not far from the Pacific) and the people who live there, especially the Buendía family who dominate Macondo for several generations. Along with the everyday political fare of revolutions, war, execution of the losing side, etc, there are recurrent surges of magical realism, alchemy, peculiar family relations, children born with tails, and towards the end an unfortunate Belgian who gets sucked into it all.

There is tremendous scope and vision here, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. I imagine that Márquez’s dense prose sings rather better in the original Spanish; the Penguin translation doesn’t really sing for me. Also I was mostly reading it in short bursts on planes which probably didn’t help. But it is very enjoyable.

I would not have watched the first episode of Flashforward if it had not been nominated for the Hugo awards this year, and actually that would have been a shame. Literally the only thing I knew about it was that it was a TV series based on a novel by Robert. J. Sawyer, and frankly that was have been enough to put me off: I find Sawyer’s prose leaden, his politics twee, and his characterisation utterly flat.

But the first episode of Flashforward sets up an intriguing premise: the entirety of the human race suffers a blackout and sees the future of 29/30 April 2010 (ie two weeks from now). Our hero, played by Joe Fiennes, is an FBI agent in Los Angeles, who is charged (in the most Sawyeresque and least convincing scene of the episode) with the task of Making Sense Of It All. Sawyer’s novels often take as their theme a Humungous Event which affects the Whole Of Humanity (or at least Canada); this show takes the premise and actually makes it come alive, with the vividly realised effects of the event on real people (including California teenagers who rather implausibly wear plenty of underwear while making out).

I noted with pleasure two actors known from Stephen Moffatt’s previous shows – Alex Kingston as Fiennes’ character’s liaison in Scotland Yard, and Jack Davenport as his wife’s future lover and, it is hinted, the Villain Behind It All. I probably won’t watch the rest, but I do hope Davenport’s character turns out to be a supernatural baddie; it would be rather a career progression from This Life and Coupling.

I would not be at all astonished to learn that the rest of the series failed to build on the promise of the first episode, but this was a very good start. (Please feel free to add spoilers in comments – I doubt that I will get around to watching the rest of it any time soon.)