I think I am going to delete all of the book reviews I have posted at Amazon.

There are several reasons for this. First off, my primary book review log is here on Livejournal. I mirror everything here (and a few from elsewhere) to LibraryThing and most of the more recent book reviews are also on GoodReads and, via Facebook, LivingSocial. Both of the latter have their downsides and irritations, but it is pretty easy to copy the reviews across.

I’ve put several dozen of my reviews on Amazon, but find the interface annoying; no markups or hyperlinks allowed, and the extra bother of thinking of a title for the piece after you have written it. In addition, the social interaction of Amazon reviews is markedly nastier than anywhere else where I have been publishing them. I do not think of myself as a particularly delicate flower, and have no objection to robust debate, but I am struck by the preponderance of negativity in the few comments my reviews there have attracted (a small symptom of a wider problem; there have been several much more dramatic and well-publicised instances of Amazon review meltdown). It’s not a pleasant space for debate, and I don’t really want my words adding to the vicious spiral.

On top of that is Amazon’s unpleasant corporate behaviour. I have hinted it before, but I will say it directly now: I think the Kindle is a swindle. There are already cheaper and better electronic book readers out there, and in particular there are readers with a sane and sensible approach to digital rights management, which I translate into layman’s terms as meaning that you actually own the book that you pay for. The recent spat between Amazon and MacMillan did no favours for either side, reputationally, but Amazon were the more obviously evil of the two companies.

I shall probably continue using Amazon, for purchases, because living where I do and reading what I do I have little option (and they do get very good marks for delivery). But I simply do not want my words on their site adding value to what they are doing, so I shall spend some time over the next few days clicking “delete” on my reviews – which will of course remain visible here and elsewhere, as described above.

• SFX: the leading science fiction, fantasy and horror magazine
• The Human Security Report
• londonkds | Something I've been thinking for years about sectarianism
  (tags: religion)

For the last couple of years I feel I have been rather neglecting the latest sf, so I decided to start catching up by getting through the shortlist for this year’s BSFA award. Yellow Blue Tibia carries the subtitle Konstantin Skvorecky’s memoir of the alien invasion of 1986, and is about a Soviet science fiction writer who becomes entangled in a complex conspiracy possibly involving aliens, Scientologists, the KGB and the Chernobyl nuclear power station in early 1986. The point of the book is at least as much the style as the substance, and I thought I recognised homages to Zamyatin and Bulgakov, as well as to the intersection between the writing of pulp sf and the Cold War as experienced on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The absurdism and surrealism extends also to one character with Asperger’s syndrome, who is himself something of a metaphor for the Soviet system. I winced when I worked out what the title meant, about halfway through.

The first book in Carey’s second trilogy, set in an alternate magical Europe. Our narrator now is Imriel de la Courcel, much-abused son of the treacherous princess Melisande, who was adopted by Phédre nò Delaunay, the central character of the previous trilogy, at the end of the last book. Imri spends the first half of this book growing to maturity between his adoptive parents’ country estate and the royal court [in what we would know as southern France], and the second half as a student in “Tiberium” [Rome] and then as a defender in the besieged city of Lucca (whose name for some reason is not changed), dealing withhis own personal demons as well as with the mysterious entanglements of his birth mother. As with Carey’s other books, I loved the lush psychological and political landscapes she has created, and am glad I have the next two books waiting for me on the shelves. It may not be Great Literature but it is very enjoyable, even though (perhaps even because) it is less kinky than the first trilogy.

Top LibraryThing Unsugegstion: Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

I have been listening to the massive 5-CD audiobook of this Tenth Doctor novel, as read by Nicholas Briggs, and enjoyed it very much. I think I saw another review somewhere pointing out that we have not really had a good Tenth Doctor story with Daleks on TV (bar perhaps Doomsday which they shared with the Cybermen; the New York two-parter was possibly the weakest of all Tenth Doctor stories, and the climax to Season Four certainly the most self-indulgent of all RTD’s finales). So I felt that Prisoner of the Daleks filled a void. Once again, we have Ten, post-Journey’s End, travelling still on his own, encountering Dalek bounty hunters in a separate time track (one of them comes from Gauda Prime, which made me smile). It’s an exotic crew, who first suspect and then cooperate with the Doctor; an early success against the Daleks turns into a debacle with the survivors captured (given the title of the book, this is hardly a spoiler) at the mercy of a particularly memorably nasty individual, nicknamed “Dalek X”. Baxendale captured the Tenth Doctor and the other characters well, and Briggs uses his talent for different voices to the maximum. Looking back at other work of Baxendale’s which I have read, I always felt he was pretty good but not always terribly even in execution; I think it comes together well in Prisoner of the Daleks.

I got to know the author ten years ago while he was the Bosnian ambassador to the EU and NATO, and he did one thing for me for which I will forever remain grateful: he introduced me to sushi. In 2000 he resigned his diplomatic position and returned to his career in banking, and most of the essays collected here were written after that, as opinion pieces for the WSJ Europe, European Voice, etc, drawing on Miles’ experience as an adviser to the wartime Croatian, Bosnian and Bosnian Croat leadership.

The two best sections were at the beginning and the end. The first couple of essays are the two title pieces – “If There Had Been No ‘Storm’ [Da Nije Bilo Oluje]” and “Who Saved Bosnia?” which make the case that, whatever Croatia’s previous or subsequent errors, the ‘Storm’ offensive by the Croatian army of August 1995 effectively ended the war on terms that Bosnia could live with.

I was less grabbed by the middle sections, a large number of pieces attacking the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague and also arguing that Croatia ought to be given a free pass to EU and NATO integration. These issues will be of historical interest only very soon (as ICTY closes and as EU accession talks near completion), but the pieces rather demonstrate how little even the best-informed observers from the region grasped what was really going on with the international community’s strategy. There are also a couple of pieces about that perennial chestnut, Bosnian constitutional reform.

But the final essays are back on form, looking at trade integration for the Balkan states, both with each other and with the EU, and also proposing rather cheekily that the Kosovo diaspora should simply purchase their homeland from Serbia. The book won’t be on any best-seller lists but I’m glad to have it on my shelves.

January Books 30) Southern Sudan: Too Many Agreements Dishonoured, by Abel Alier

I have read a fair bit of conflict literature, but this is quite an unusual book of general interst in conflict resolution as well as being an important primary source on the history of Sudan between 1965 and 1989 (published 1990, 2nd edition 1992). Alier, who had managed to make himself the indispensible southerner to the government in Khartoum, successfully managed a peace process with the southern rebels which ended the first Sudanese civil war of 1955-72 and set up an autonomous government in Southern Sudan for the south, which Alier himself then ran for more than half of its life. Without using any jargon, Alier goes into considerable detail of how the 1972 Addis Ababa agreement was negotiated – particularly interesting with regard to the security guarantees; a tortuous and at times underhanded process, the delegations at one point appealing directly to the Emperor, Haile Selassie, to settle an important point of disagreement. He discusses the rest as well, but once you have settled on autonomy within the state as the solution, and identified the negotiating parties in the dispute – though neither of those processes was straightforward – security was the key outstanding problem.

Alier then describes the successes and problems of the southern government between 1972 and its abolition in 1983, with a depressed coda on the failure of the following years to reach a peace settlement and the elements which he (correctly) predicts such a settlement must contain. He also includes the primary documents from the pre-1972 process.

February Books 1) War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan, by Francis M. Deng

Deng is more of an academic than Alier, though he too is also a practitioner. In this 1995 book he covers a lot more ground in time and space than Alier, though generally in less detail; and he pulls in evidence from anthropology, cultural studies, and political science in support of his thesis that the Sudan conflict should be understood as a struggle between identities, not all of them Sudanese. I was impressed by his lucidity in explaining the various perspectives; I am more used to the discourse of nationalisms around Europe, and there are rather different nuances in both the Arab world and Africa (which of course intersect in Sudan). Deng, like Alier, was writing long before the 2005 peace agreement but, also like Alier, he expresses doubt that Sudan can be held together.

The most useful section for me was on the district of Abyei, the “crossroads of the conflict” as Deng puts it, where local dynamics between the Dinka and Arabs (to simplify the identities rather drastically) escalated over the 1970s and 1980s to the point where it became a significant factor in the destabilisation of the whole country. Alier says nothing at all about Abyei, but it is of course subject to a whole separate set of provisions in the 2005 Agreement.

The big mystery remaining for me is why Nimeiri, the Sudanese leader from 1969 to 1985, first allowed the Addis Ababa agreement to happen in 1972 and then reneged on his commitments in 1983. Alier and Deng have very different views on this. Alier sees Nimeiri as guided by popular dissatisfaction with the long war and taking his (Alier’s) advice on how to end it; and then later undergoing a personal religious re-commitment to Islamism from which it followed that the powers of the non-Muslim south must be removed. Deng believes that the Addis Ababa agreement was never more than a tactical ploy by Nimeiri, who shared the general northern prejudice against southerners but spotted a way of using the south as a supportive factor in northern politics. On this interpretation, when Nimeiri found that he could cut a deal with the northern Islamists, the southern settlement, to which he was never really committed, became dispensable. Both writers knew Nimeiri well and worked with him at the time; Deng also cites private conversations with him after his overthrow. No doubt the truth lies somewhere in between; Alier of course naturally believes in the importance of his own earlier work, but Deng could perhaps have been more sceptical of Nimeiri’s retrospective imagining of his earlier actions.

Anyway, both strongly recommended for Sudanists, and Alier I think is of more general interest for its case-study of peace-making with a popular insurgency.

• Lancet accepts MMR study 'false'
  The medical journal which originally published the discredited research linking autism and MMR has now issued a full retraction of the paper – and how many children have died as a result?
  (tags: autism)

An appointment with yet another dentist – an exotic endodontist this time – to try and pin down my continuing left upper molar problems. Root canal surgery booked for later this month. Ooogh.

Wild Life by Molly Gloss
Doctor Who: Ten Little Aliens by Steve Cole
Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-first Century by Matt Hills
Juba Arabic – English Dictionary, by Ian Smith and Morris T. Ama
Moon Stallion by Brian Hayles
Argonautica by Valerius Flaccus
Southern Sudan: Too Many Agreements Dishonoured by Abel Alier
Rookwood by William Harrison Ainsworth
Doctor Who Annual 1968
War of Visions: Conflicts of Identities in the Sudan by Francis Mading Deng
Faust (Part I) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Doctor Who: Prisoner of the Daleks by Trevor Baxendale
Return of the Living Dad by Kate Orman
The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong
Transition by Iain Banks
Travel Green Thailand by Richard Werly
Resolving the Cyprus Conflict: Negotiating History by Michalis Stavrou Michael
Elizabeth’s Irish Wars by Cyril Falls

Non-fiction: 8

Fiction (non-sf): 7

SF (non-Who): 10

Doctor Who: 5

5/30 by women (Rendell, Austen, Orman, Blackman, Le Guin)
4/30 by PoC (Blackman, anonymous Confucian sages, Ama, Alier)
12/30 owned for more than a year (The Uplift War [reread], Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung, The Wheel of Engaged Buddhism, Year’s Best SF 8, Irish Tales of Terror, The Two Faces of Islam, Cat’s Cradle: Times Crucible, Let It Bleed, Vampire Science, Mortal Causes, Thirteen Steps Down, Holy Disorders, The Wandering Fire)
1 other reread (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), total 2/30
page-count ~8400 (allowing for the fact that I didn’t read all the explanatory material of Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung, and only the front and back matter of the Juba Arabic English Dictionary)

I was deeply irritated to discover that a draft I had written of this post mysteriously got deleted after I had rewatched (and written up) 23 episodes of the 26 covered here. But sometimes that is the way the cookie crumbles. The thoughts below are therefore not quite as spontaneous, or as long, as I would have liked. But I hope they will be mildly entertaining.

I am a real fan of The Savages, which is a rare case of Hartnell-era Who taking a standard sfnal plot and getting it right. The Doctor is a heroic, mythic figure to the Elders who have been following him for a long time; but he is also a heroic figure for us, standing up for Good against Evil even at the cost of his own vital essence. Indeed, the nastiness of the Elders is rather scary; a combination of Plato and Mengele. Note also Frederick Jaeger’s brilliant performance as Jano when possessed by the essence of the First Doctor. And the incidental music is superb, and Steven gets a decent sendoff. Poor Dodo is crying her eyes out.

Steven has now seen off Barbara, Vicki, Katarina, Sara Kingdom, and leaves only two episodes before Dodo. It must have been a bit frustrating for Purves being essentially Hartnell’s straight man, and I can also see why the new production team wanted a male companion who was less of a blank slate – I think we know less about Steven’s background than any other companion of the black and white era. His finest moment comes when he is on his own in The Massacre (and I’m sure he was totally bonking Anne Chaplette, and her [their?] descendant Dodo too).

I knew Purves when I was a child from his long years on Blue Peter, and remember being stunned to discover that he had been a Doctor Who companion. His restrained but dramatic tones illustrate the audio releases of his (sadly many) lost stories, and he did an early and good Companion Chronicle for Big Finish, set in the Napoleonic wars.

Incidentally, I am keeping a running tally of things still in the Tardis somewhere: the Fifth Key of Marinus, Susan’s other shoe, and Hi-Fi, Steven’s cuddly panda.

The War Machines is another great story. Good heavens, the First Doctor, of all Doctors, in a London night club? I think his only successor to venture to such a place is Nine, and that is during the Blitz. Indeed this is one of the most New Who-like stories, with an sfnal threat in contemporary London, and Kenneth Kendall performing a role taken by Andrew Marr in Aliens of London.

The theme of technology being misused is shared with the previous story; so is the Doctor being a known quanitity, who can just turn up with some companion to crash on Sir Charles’ spare bed. The plot is good and Hartnell in his element (likewise all three companions). The DVD extras point out that James Cameron uses the what-if-WOTAN-won scenario for the future in the Terminator films, and presumably this is the most likely source for a Canadian lad in the late 60s. Shame that the War Machines themselves are a bit rubbish, and Dodo deserved a better sendoff.

Speaking of which, I have already written a lot (probably far too much) about Dodo Chaplet. I think I must revise my opinion of Jackie Lane’s acting skills upwards, having now watched all her stories in sequence; she is no Jean Marsh or Anneke Wills, but she sometimes rises above the material (and lack of direction) and is lovely and cuddly with both Hartnell and Purves. She is far from being the Worst Companion Of All Time. (Kamelion, anyone? Adric? Jo Grant? Victoria? Ace?) Dodo gets a rather tragic post-Tardis story in David Bishop’s Who Killed Kennedy? which at least gives her a better send-off than she was given on TV.

The Smugglers is also particularly hampered now by the loss of the visuals – the very few surviving clips make it look like this was a beautifully shot and directed story, and there is a long fight sequence in the last episode which we can now only guess at. The script is a bit lame, but has the peculiar supernatural incidents of Ben and Polly practicing witchcraft and the Doctor indulging in cartomancy, demonstrating Brian Hayles’ interest in the supernatural which was to come to fruition in Moon Stallion. I note also Paul Whitsun-Jones as the Squire playing almost the same role as in The Mutants several years later.

There are two things everyone knows about The Tenth Planet, but before I discuss them I will just mention that a) it is a much more chromatic story than we have ever had (excepting perhaps Marco Polo) with a Caribbean astronaut and a silent bloke in Geneva in an African garment; b) it loses marks for having no visible women apart from Polly and another Geneva-based operative who gets about two lines; c) once again the Doctor appears as a repository of mythic knowledge (we never see exactly what he writes down about the appearance of Mondas); d) the Z-Bomb plot of episode 3 is a bit out of left field but actually carries through the theme of misused technology rather well, from Mondas to Earth and the Cold War; and e) Robert Beatty smashes up a Belfast pub run by William Hartnell in Carol Reed’s film Odd Man Out, so Hartnell returns the favour here by bringing chaos to Beatty’s Antarctic base.

The second thing everyone knows about The Tenth Planet is that it is the first Cyberman story. There is only one better Cyberman story in the whole of Old and New Who (Tomb of the Cybermen, of course). The idea of people who have removed everything that made them people is an audacious one, and the unearthly voices and excellent music make it unforgettable. It is also the first “base under siege” story, and one of the best of that sub-genre. I am not at all surprised that it topped my recent poll of most eagerly anticipated DVD releases.

The first thing that everyone knows about The Tenth Planet is that it is William Hartnell’s last hurrah. In the first two episodes and the surviving clips from the last one he seems to be on top form, enjoying it through to the end. That final surviving clip of him approaching the camera and telling us that it is not all over is very spooky indeed. And then he falls to the floor, and his face shimmers and changes, and goodness, Doctor Who has died and been replaced by someone else. I found it pretty shocking after I first watched The Tenth Planet on its own, but now after 28 (or 29) stories and 134 episodes, it comes as a huge disorientation: the Doctor has gone.

There are some who feel that Hartnell actually Wasn’t Very Good. I would strongly contest that viewpoint. I will admit that he fluffs his lines more than would be acceptable today (probably more than was really acceptable even back then), and occasionally resorts to comic chortles and sniffs (though usually to cover a bad script). But he creates the Doctor as an alien unknowable character, in a way that only Tom Baker and Christopher Ecclestone after him achieved.

It also surely must be admitted that the First Doctor is the only one pre-2005 who actually gets any character development at all. As remarked above, at the beginning he is an obscure and somewhat cynical outsider, brought into local disputes by accidents of transportation; by the end he is an insider of heroic inclination – he is known by the Elders and Sir Charles Summers, who won’t let the villagers be massacred by the pirates, who knows the secret of Mondas. He has also cast aside his links with his own past – Susan left on the post-Dalek Earth, the Monk abandoned on a hostile planet. He has changed, and the nature of the story changes with him.

I have a piece brewing in my head about Shakespeare and Doctor Who, and just wanted to respond to a comment I saw somewhere comparing the Doctor – specifically, the First Doctor – to Prospero. There are huge and insuperable differences, it seems to me. Prospero is not a traveller; he is a sorcerous despot. He is not a righter of wrongs; he intimidates both locals and visitors in order to set his daughter up with the right man. At the end, Prospero gives it all up for an honourable retirement; but the Doctor simply becomes someone else. I will admit that they are both somewhat magical; but (to pick two that come to mind) Gandalf is rather more closely related to Ogion than Prospero to the First Doctor, and even that is not very close.

I have the unfashionable view that The Power of the Daleks is the better of the two Troughton stories featuring the malignant pepperpots. It’s a story about identity and motivations, with the new Doctor trying to establish the same confidence with his companions that the Daleks are attempting with the human colony on Vulcan, each of them masquerading (as the Examiner, and as servants, respectively). There are several very impressive performances here: Robert James as deluded Lesterson, moving from naïve credulity to horror at the magnitude of his mistake; Bernard Archard as the ambitious Bragen, nine years before he returned as Marcus Scarman, once again a human who dooms himself by trying to cut a deal with destructive alien forces; Pamela Ann Davy as Janley, an unusually strong female part for the era; and most of all, Peter Hawkins given far more than usual to do as the Daleks pretend to be servile.

This is also of course Troughton’s debut, and although Ben and Polly may not be sure who he is, we the audience are left in no doubt; partly from the way he dominates as an actor, but also by the fact that we are reassured in non-verbal ways by the way in which it is directed. Yet this is a new Doctor, brave but also terrified, fighting the Daleks not from outrage but from fear, while tootling on his recorder and wearing a funny hat. The programme is going in a new direction.

After all that, The Highlanders is a bit of a shift backwards. It is essentially a standard Who plot – Doctor and companions land, get separated and variously captured by the bad guys and need rescuing, and leave again – but set in the eighteenth century, and really, now that Who has found its sfnal soul, it seems pointless to do this without aliens or mad scientists, or preferably both. Having said that, there are some good bits – Hannah Gordon before she made the big time as Kirsty, Polly using her feminine wiles, the Doctor playing with identities again. But they take the rather thick young piper with then for some reason at the end. I wonder how long he will last?

This is the first run of stories where the historicals are noticeably weaker than the sfnals, The Smugglers and The Highlanders both being rather forgettable. Clearly the Lloyd / Davis team had little interest in continuing the sub-genre, and it’s not surprising that The Highlanders is the last of its kind.

A final point – I am nearly at the end of the longest continuous gap in the video record – from the last episode of The Tenth Planet to the second of The Underwater Menace inclusive, a baker’s dozen – and it is pretty infuriating. What a shame it is that the BBC threw so much work away.

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

I got home to find this waiting for me (would have been nice if it had arrived before I went to Juba) and skimmed through it to get the most important points. Juba Arabic is used as a lingua franca across Southern Sudan (where the official language is [sometimes] English, and most speak their own tribal language). I haven’t as yet particularly felt the lack of it in Juba itself, where I stay at an Ethiopian hotel and hire a Kenyan driver, but making the effort is important.

From Smith and Ama’s account, it is a pretty simple language (like most creole languages) but has some interesting twists, like interrogatives going at the end of questions (“You did what?” “We are going where?”) and surviving without infinitives (“It is good to eat” “Food is good”). I know that some of you are interested in language construction – this seemed to me an interesting example of a language constructed over the last 200 years of Arab-speakers’ influence on the region.

Particularly useful – a section listing and explaining traditional foods, though it might not have killed the authors to provide the correct English names of the various types of fish and vegetables rather than just describing them. I was particularly amused that the samak yabis from Bor are named after the former political leader Abel Alier, while those from Nimule are named for his rival Lagu.

The book is also aimed at Juba Arabic speakers who want to improve their English. The very first sentence provided for them is the translation of the Juba Arabic Human azib-o lehaadi huwa worii le-oman sir: “They tortured him until he told them the secret”. I winced when I saw that, but then realised that in fact it is illustrating subtleties of translation of the verb azibu, which has a rather less dramatic meaning in the sentence Kelib de gi-azib ana: “That dog is bothering me”. I guess context is everything.

This is the Penguin edition of two of the Four Books of Confucian learning, their titles respectively translated as The Highest Order of Cultivation and On the Practice of the Mean. It is a bit of a shame that Penguin chose to stick to the old Wade-Giles transliteration; in the pin-yin more often used today the titles are Daxue and Zhongyong. (Or to be pedantic, 大學 and 中庸.) Although the two books are mercifully short, I found their conservative, paternalistic world view unappealing; a society built on this philosophy could easily become stagnated. I don’t have much knowledge of China, and this was probably not a good place to start broadening it (and perhaps it would have been better if not on an intercontinental red-eye at the time).

Gosh, it’s over a year since I read The Moving ToyshopTop LibaryThing Unsuggestion: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers, which I did not like as much.