• Sir Reg makes his pitch
  Description of my day at the BBC in last two paragraphs
  (tags: northernireland bbc)

Will be on BBC Radio Ulster in about an hour:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/radioulster/

“Doctor Who”: The Runaway Train by Oli Smith
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
Captain Britain And MI13 Volume 3: Vampire State by Paul Cornell
Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman
The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad
“Doctor Who”: Night of the Humans by David Llewellyn
“Doctor Who”: The Forgotten Army by Brian Minchin
“Doctor Who”: Apollo 23 by Justin Richards
The Dr Who Annual 1970
The Hundred-Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
Faerie Queene ed by A. Hamilton
Advise And Consent by Allen Drury
Fables Vol 12: The Dark Ages by Bill Willingham
A New History of Ireland, Volume III: Early Modern Ireland 1534-1691 ed by T. W. Moody
Spenser’s The Faerie Queen – A Selection of Critical Essays by Peter C. Bayley
Far North by Marcel Theroux
Anno Mortis: Tomes of the Dead Series by Rebecca Levene
Double Falsehood Or The Distressed Lovers: A Play (1728) by William Shakespeare
Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones
Desert by J. M. G. Le Clezio
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
Stress Pattern by Neal Barrett
Unauthorised Departure by Maureen O’Brien
Judge Dredd: Novelisation by Neal Barrett

Non-Fiction 4 (YTD 22)
Untold Stories, by Alan Bennett
Triumph of a Time Lord, by Matt Hills
The Twilight of Atheism, by Alister McGrath
The Koran     

Fiction (non-sf) 8 (YTD 23)
The Emperor’s Babe, by Bernardine Evaristo
The Great Dinosaur Robbery, by David Forrest
One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, by John Harvey
Double Falshood, or, The Distrest Lovers, by William Shakespeare et al
Unauthorised Departure, by Maureen O’Brien
Njal’s Saga
The Hanging Garden, by Ian Rankin
The Crucible, by Arthur Miller     

SF (non-Who) 9 (YTD 32)
The Vor Game, by Lois McMaster Bujold
One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez
Seasons of Plenty, by Colin Greenland
Impossible Things, by Connie Willis
The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne Jones
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin
Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett
Stress Pattern, by Neal Barrett jr
Judge Dredd, by Neal Barrett jr   

Doctor Who etc fiction 7 (YTD 24)
Nightshade, by Mark Gatiss
Kursaal, by Peter Anghelides
Sick Building, by Paul Magrs
Doctor Who Annual 1970
The Forgotten Army, by Brian Minchin
The Runaway Train, by Oli Smith
Short Trips: The Centenarian, edited by Ian Farrington

Comics 2 (YTD 2)
Fables vol 12: The Dark Ages, by Bill Willingham
Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? by Neil Gaiman
      

6/30 (YTD 22/103) by women (Evaristo, O’Brien, Bujold, Willis, Jones, Jemisin)
2/30 (YTD 9/103) by PoC (Evaristo, Jemisin)
10/30 owned for more than a year (The Vor Game [reread], The Twilight of Atheism, One Hundred Years of Solitude [reread], Seasons of Plenty, Impossible Things, Untold Stories, Nightshade, Kursaal, The Hanging Garden, The Koran)
2/30 reread, total YTD rereads 8/103
Page count ~8,900 (YTD ~31,300) including a notional 100 for The Runaway Train.

The Koran is a tough read. It is of course meant to be read in the original Arabic – and meant to be read out loud, recited, memorised, so that every detail of the text sinks into the memory; it helps also if you are familiar with the career of the Prophet and thus able to relate particular passages to particular issues face by him and his followers during the two decades of his ministry. But even then, I think it is a tough read.

The 114 Suras are arranged roughly in decreasing order of length, which means that there is no internal progression of ideas, and certainly no chronological sequencing (the most we get is that some are tagged as written in Medina and others in Mecca). Sura 2, the longest, covers thirty pages and addresses many subjects including the creation of Adam, the observance of Ramadan, and the witnessing of debts. There is little variation of style: this is a series of revelations to a single individual, and is therefore in a single prophetic voice throughout (unlike, say, the Bible which was written by dozens of authors over a period of several centuries, and includes straight history, poetry and allegorical fable).

I notice that gardens are often mentioned, particularly as a metaphor for paradise, and I find that rather moving – I have not been to the desert myself but I can imagine how our primeval attraction to garden landscapes must be intensified by living in conditions of extreme aridity. I was interested to come across familiar (and less familiar) narratives from the Bible and from Christian tradition, proclaimed from a rather different direction; a useful reminder that these stories all began as living, breathing texts. Since I’m not likely to put in the years of study necessary to fuly grasp the text, I find it difficult to really make an assessment of the Koran as a whole. But I am glad that I have at least read it from cover to cover.

Those of you who look at the Belfast News Letter may have picked up yesterday’s 24-page election special, which stars me on the front page and at various points within. I shall also be on BBC Rsdio Ulster’s “Inside Politics” programme on Sunday lunchtime, for those of you within range or inclined to listen on-line.

In particular on Thursday night I shall be in the BBC Northern Ireland television studio analysing the election results as they come in overnight (the first time that has happened). I guess this display will be visible only to viewers who get BBC NI (ie the whole of the island, if they want) but I hope there may be some cut across to the coverage in the rest of the UK, so as the cameras switch from Dimbleby to the Belfast studio for light relief you may see me in the background.

All good fun.

Gaiman claims here that he is returning to his roots, by writing a piece about his first serious fandom (though he does not put it like that); it is a two-part story about Batman’s funeral, but in Gaiman’s hands it becomes much more than that, developing into an exploration of story and modern mythology and what they might mean to those who experience them. I thought it was very good; the deluxe edition comes with several other Gaiman-scripted stories in the Batman universe, of which the best are the first two, one featuring the Joker and Batman sitting around waiting for their turn to appear on the page, the other exploring the character of Poison Ivy, constrained in the Arkham Asylum. So that’s two of this year’s Best Graphic Story shortlist read; I will be surprised if any of the other three beats this one.

I guess I’ve read half a dozen of Big Finish’s Short Trips anthologies by now, and found them a bit of a mixed bag; sometimes a decent linking concept makes the whole better than the sum of its parts, sometimes one or two outstanding stories are all that can overcome the problems of a duff central idea. This is one of the better volumes I have read in the series. Edward Grainger, born in 1906, find himself bumping into the Doctor repeatedly over the following century. Poor chap, he often seems to be on the spot when alien invasion threatens Earth, but he is not the only character in the Whoniverse of whom this is true, and at least he spends part of his career as a spy so there is some excuse. The standount story for me was “The Church of Football”, by Benjamin Adams, an account of the Fifth Doctor’s visit to a Sheffield United v. Arsenal match in 1936 told in the first person by Peri Brown. I was a little disappointed that Grainger didn’t pop up in the background of any of the Old Who stories with contemporary settings – the one reference to UNIT seemed anachronistic to me – but it’s generally a good collection.

This was a free giveaway Doctor Who CD from the Daily Telegraph last week, apparently to be released more formally in a few months as one of the planned series of Eleventh Doctor original audio books. It’s set in the Wild West, which is less original a concept than it was before The Peacemaker (Tenth Doctor book and audio from 2008) and Freakshow (Companion Chronicle audio as told by Mark Strickson as Turlough from ealier this year), and of course was used in Old Who as early as 1966. Matt Smith is good at delivering both the background narrative and his own Doctor’s voice; elsewhere he is decent at characterisation but distinctly less good at either Amy’s Scottish or the other characters’ American accents. Also the story itself is rather poorly paced for audiobook, which can sometimes be an unforgiving medium. So on the whole this one is worth looking out for free rather than buying.
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• elmyra: I am an Eastern European
  (tags: ukpolitics bigotry)

The first three Eleventh Doctor novels were published last week, and I entirely randomly decided to start with the one written by my cousin. Actually I think Brian is the first script editor of Doctor Who to have a spinoff novel published while his episodes were being shown (though David Whitaker, of course, set the ball rolling with the very first Doctor Who novelisation back in 1964).

It is a good yarn. The Doctor and Amy land in contemporary New York, where a newly discovered mammoth in the Natural History Museum comes to life and starts causing chaos – but turns out to be harbouring a much more dangerous secret; and an army of Vykoids brings chaos to Manhattan even if they are only seven centimentres tall. It’s aimed at a younger readership – more so than the Ninth and Tenth Doctor novels I have read – but that just means you get it for your 8-13 year old friends or relatives and then borrow it back. Or read it first yourself. Or just forget to give it to them.

As you would hope from the show’s script editor, the novel catches the Doctor and Amy perfectly, particularly when the Doctor is put out of action for a couple of chapters and Amy has to take over the narrative. Trinity Wells, famous American newsreader, gets gratifyingly namechecked, and there are references also to mysterious cracks (qv) and to Nile Penguins (which baffled me but looked Significant). Mutual relatives will note with appreciation that the three main supporting characters are called Sam, Oscar and Polly; actually this will be a lasting source of pleasure to three of our younger relatives, though at least one of them is too small to notice as yet. (And apparently the great centres of learning include Yale, Harvard and Aberystwyth.)

I have the other two novels on the shelf, and will report back on them in due course, but this was a good start to the Eleventh Doctor’s career in dead tree format.

• : Belgium's self-destructive politics
  the Belgium I know is a laid-back, relaxed place with a well-developed sense of humour about itself. Unfortunately, it is hobbled by strangely irresponsible politicians, some of whom do not care if a quite different impression is sent to the outside world.
  (tags: Belgium)

A locked entry for now, as I intend to write a public commentary on the first (but not the second) of these two problematic cases, and obviously they are both sensitive.

I’m really sad that Mehmet Ali Talat lost the election in Cyprus last week. I’ve been working with him for just about three years; I found him committed, intelligent, witty, and vigorous in defence of his own views – as well as ready to admit his own mistakes. Unfortunately he never had a negotiating partner on the Greek Cypriot side who was as serious about reaching a settlement as he was. Tassos Papadopoulos, who was the Greek Cypriot president from 2003 to 2008, was committed to deadlock and stagnation; Dimitris Christofias, who defeated Papadopoulos on a moderately pro-solution ticket in 2008, has been too scared of his own hardline government coalition partners to cut the deal. Meanwhile the EU failed to deliver on the commitments it made to the Turkish Cypriot people after they voted in favour of reunification (and the Greek Cypriots voted against) in 2004. None of this was Talat’s fault, but the Turkish Cypriot voters have nobody else to punish; so he lost.

I see some commentators saying that a Cyprus settlement is so important to Turkey that Ankara will surely not let Talat’s successor, Derviş Eroğlu, slow down the process. I have to say that the idea that Ankara decisively controls the political process in northern Cyprus has surely been dealt a fatal blow by last week’s election results. I really don’t see any reason for optimism that the Turkish government will decide to bully the new Turkish Cypriot leader into accepting the agenda of candidate he has just defeated.

Much farther south, my main interlocutor in the Government of Southern Sudan, General Oyay Deng Ajak, failed to win a seat in the parliamentary elections held two weeks ago (which were deeply flawed, but the fact that three ministers lost seats suggests a more complex picture). He’ll survive – fortunately (and sensibly) you don’t have to be in parliament to hold ministerial office in Southern Sudan – but it has meant that he is rather distracted from his ministerial duties at present.

I’m fundamentally in favour of democracy, but applying it to peace-making is not always straightforward, and sometimes actually the wrong thing to do.

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.