India Foxtrot Yankee Oscar Uniform Charlie Alpha November Uniform November Delta Echo Romeo Sierra Tango Alpha November Delta Tango Hotel India Sierra, Charlie Oscar Papa Yankee Alpha November Delta Papa Alpha Sierra Tango Echo India Tango India November Tango Oscar Yankee Oscar Uniform Romeo Lima India Victor Echo Juliet Oscar Uniform Romeo November Alpha Lima.

• Daily Kos: Freak Current Takes Gulf Stream to Greenland
  The Gulf Stream has gone west; will it come back?
  (tags: climatechange)

Another sf anthology revisited from my bookshelves (though I found I’d left a bookmark at page 402, and don’t remember previously reading the last few stories). This is Hartwell’s selection of the best stories of 2002: of his 23 choices, I think I count precisely one which made it to the Nebula shortlist, and two which were Hugo nominees (one of which, Michael Swanwick’s “Slow Life”, won). That year’s double winner was Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, which I guess is excluded from Hartwell’s collection as fantasy rather than science fiction.

I liked very much almost all of Hartwell’s selection. The one that really got under my skin was A.M. Dellamonica’s “A Slow Day At The Gallery”; two others that had stuck in my mind from first reading were Charles Stross’s “Halo” and Greg Egan’s “Singleton”. There were unfortunately a couple of mawkish stories about cute old people, which I note is a disturbing and not particularly funny or interesting trend in American sf these days. All the others are very good. Worth returning to.

LibraryThing Unsuggestion: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Also numerous other books I have read, some of which I even enjoyed.

I was already becoming a fan of Rankin’s novels about Edinburgh policeman John Rebus, but particularly enjoyed this one for the Northern Ireland dimension. Last time Rebus went outside Scotland (to London, in Tooth and Nail) it wasn’t really a success, but here he takes an effective day trip to Belfast(though he mysteriously visits a fictional Malone Road police station) to chase up Loyalist terrorists who may be planning to attack the Edinburgh Festival. The whole picture came together rather neatly at the end, in an arrangement of events reminiscent of the better Agatha Christie novels but in a believable police procedural setting – including high-level collusion with the terrorists, and the blurred lines of demarcation between organised crime, the forces of law and order, and the press. I did wonder about the sub-plot with the seductive and mildly psychotic lady lawyer, but perhaps this is a set-up for something in a later volume. Apart from that, all nicely done.

LibraryThing Unsuggestion: Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein

Just went and got my eyes tested for bifocals.

(In French they are progressifs, which sounds much more optimistic.)

I have been getting a lot of Japanese comment spam in the last couple of months – always from anonymous users, usually entirely in Japanese though with the odd random word in English; no links, just text. I have set up automatic screening for anonymous comments, so nobody apart from me sees them before they are deleted; but I am surprised that this has persisted, even after I switched on the option requiring anonymous commenters to identify the letters in a randomly generated image. This must mean that someone is physically going to the trouble of posting these comments which I cannot read and nobody else will read.

Why?

Grinding through the numbers from this poll, the numbers of books from my 2009 list reported by each respondent are as follows:

101; 80; 79; 75; 73; 73; 73; 66; 65; 64; 63; 61; 60; 60; 60; 59; 59; 58; 58; 57; 56; 56; 56; 54; 52; 51; 51; 50; 49; 48; 48; 47; 47; 46; 46; 45; 44; 44; 44; 43; 43; 43; 42; 42; 41; 41; 41; 41; 39; 39; 39; 39; 39; 38; 38; 38; 38; 37; 37; 37; 36; 36; 35; 33; 33; 32; 32; 31; 31; 30; 30; 30; 30; 29; 29; 29; 29; 29; 28; 27; 27; 26; 25; 24; 24; 24; 24; 24; 23; 21; 21; 20; 20; 20; 20; 20; 19; 19; 18; 17; 17; 16; 15; 15; 15; 14; 13; 13; 12; 10; and 6.

And of those of you who responded to this poll, the book tallies were:

62; 53; 52; 51; 48; 40; 36; 35; 34; 32; 32; 31; 30; 29; 29; 28; 28; 28; 27; 27; 25; 25; 24; 23; 22; 21; 20; 20; 18; 18; 18; 18; 18; 18; 18; 17; 16; 16; 15; 15; 15; 14; 13; 13; 12; 11; 11; 11; 11; 11; 10; 2 and 1

, our bookshelves are obviously linked through L-Space!

So, my first book of 2010 was published exactly 150 years ago. Framley Parsonage is the fourth of Trollope’s six Barsetshire novels, mainly concerning the initial hostility and eventual approval of Lord Lufton’s mother towards her son’s love for the more humbly born Lucy Robarts; a substantial subplot concerns the financial problems of Lucy’s brother Mark, who is the vicar of Framley and whose home therefore gives the book its title. Although it recapitulates much the same plot as Doctor Thorne, the third in the series, I think it is rather better: the characters are more likeable, and the rather nasty sneering at the lower orders which crept into Doctor Thorne is replaced by some jabs at the comfortable contemporary reader which are a little (though only a little) more savage than Trollope’s usual gentle mockery: “There are two classes of persons in this realm who are constitutionally inefficient to take any part in returning members to Parliament—peers, namely, and women.” “You millionaires always talk of Christian resignation, because you never are called on to resign anything. ” And, summing up pretty much the whole book: “A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen”. Trollope is particularly cynical about party politics; he sees almost no ideological difference between Whigs and Tories, simply different styles of snobbery and patronage. But his cynicism is not especially vicious, and he sees the situation as part of the natural order, peculiar and quirky though it may sometimes seen. (There is no suggestion that women might perhaps be given the vote, let alone that the peerage could be reformed.)

This has been my Blackberry book for a couple of months – progressing at about a chapter a day. I’ll download the next from Project Gutenberg in due course, but may try something other than Trollope first.

LibraryThing unrecommendation: Prey by Michael Crichton

In general I am doing these write-ups in groups of six stories at a time, regardless of season breaks or (for next time) changes of Doctor. By most counts, however, this entry covers seven stories, not six. But I persist in my own eccentric view that Mission To The Unknown should be considered as part of The Daleks’ Master Plan, in the teeth of everyone else’s opposition (and of the evidence from BBC official documents that it should be considered, if not separately, then as a fifth episode of Galaxy Four). So The Myth Makers is the first story of those reviewed below, and Mission to the Unknown in effect is the zeroth story for this month’s write-up. OK?

One thing that struck me as never before about Mission to the Unknown: it is a terribly bleak story, with the human characters all dead by the end, their mission an apparent failure – pretty edgy for a children’s programme, and puts Adelaide’s fate in The Waters of Mars into a long-term context. And of course we are further disoriented by the unprecedented (and unrepeated) non-appearance of the Doctor or any of the Tardis crew. But I also noted that this story is clearly to be understood as being in much the same part of space and time as Galaxy Four – the Tardis crew ended the last episode looking at Kembel and wondering what might be happening there (NB also Mavic Chen’s comment in The Daleks’ Master Plan about relations with the Fourth Galaxy, and the fact that Zephon is Master of the Fifth Galaxy). This makes The Myth Makers the odd story out in the first half of the third season, which is otherwise set in the far future of the Drahvins and the Daleks. (Though the confusion about the difference between galaxies and solar systems – which Wood and Miles have mercilessly chronicled – remains; note also Malpha’s remark about where the Daleks come from.) Good music, good scenery (as far as we can tell) but only 7.69% of a plot.

The first three episodes of The Myth Makers are tremendous fun, rather in the spirit of Carry On Cleo which came out a few months earlier. The switch to epic drama and tragedy in the last episode is rather effective and sets the tone for the next story better than I had remembered. Donald Cotton presumes that the audience will have sufficient familiarity with the Trojan legends to appreciate the paradox of the various heroes being vain, cowardly, stupid, greedy or alcoholic. I wonder also if he deliberately reversed the events of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where Cressida leaves Troilus for Diomede rather than the other way round. I know that the received wisdom is against me on this, but mention two further, admittedly weak, hints at a deberate reversal: Vicki arrives in Troy while Shakespeare’s Cressida leaves the city; and Hector is killed at the end of the Shakespeare play but the beginning of the Who story. Also, though this may not count, Troilus kills Achilles here, whereas Shakespeare has Achilles triumphant and alive at the end. The lore is that Hartnell was in bad form while this was being made, but he seems to me to greatly enjoy his banter with Ivor Salter as Odysseus. Mind you, I felt a bit sad when I realised that John Wiles’ name had replaced Verity Lambert’s in the credits, and I am sure Hartnell must have started wondering how much longer he would last as the sole survivor of the original cast and crew. (Another year, as it turned out.)

Vicki surprised me as I watched her stories in sequence. She is a huge contrast to Susan – she takes the initiative, she rather likes the thrills. Susan would never have armed the rebels of the Space Museum or stowed away on a Dalek time machine; but she would also never have skipped blithely off to ancient Rome or to Richard the Lion-Heart’s court. Vicki comes into the Whoniverse as a very young woman who has already had a certain amount of self-sufficiency forced on her, and her character is all the more interesting for it. And she assertively chooses her time of departure, before she even knows for sure that Troilus will have her.

Maureen O’Brien has done a couple of Big Finish audios, one as Vicki/Cressida – a suitably surreal but compelling tale of alien forces and Jane Austen, by Marc Platt. There is also a brilliant short story, “Apocrypha Bipedium”, featuring her and Troilus meeting up with the Eighth Doctor, audio companion Charley Pollard and the young William Shakespeare, in one of the Short Trips collections. I am not wild about any of the spinoff novels featuring Vicki, but the novelisations of both her debut (by Ian Marter) and her departure (by Donald Cotton) are among the best of the Target range, as is Cotton’s novelisation of The Romans. (I am on the lookout for any of Maureen O’Brien’s own detective novels.)

I am an unabashed fan of The Daleks’ Master Plan, and had listened to the Peter Purves narration several times. This was the first time I had watched the reconstructions in series with the surviving episodes, and I have to say it took all my self-discipline to stick to one a day; I like it even more now. The longest single Who story ever (I don’t accept Trial of a Time Lord), it pushes the buttons of Doctor vs Daleks and treacherous humans far better than any of the New Who season finales.

What struck me this time is that the Doctor has become a mildly superhuman hero from a far future society rather than the mysterious eccentric of the first and second seasons (a trend which began with Galaxy Four). He spontaneously decides to infiltrate the Daleks’ summit meeting himself and steal the tarranuim core; he is insufferably snobbish about the quaint technology of the year 4000; his non-human physiology survives the Time Destructor. John Wiles’ version of the Doctor is much more closely related to the Time Lord we know today than Verity Lambert’s was. But the heroism of Wiles’ Doctor comes at a terrible cost to those who encounter him – ask the Drahvins, the Trojans, the Huguenots, Bret Vyon, Katarina, Sara Kingdom.

Going back to the story, some have complained that the comedy episodes (#7 and half of #8) are intrusive. Again, seen in the pattern of Season 3 as a whole, it makes more sense: by the time we hit the half-way mark of DMP we have had seven episodes of non-stop drama, departure and death, and a bit of light relief, harking back in tone to the first three episodes of The Myth Makers is in order. The return of the Monk is actually a signal that we are back to serious business: last time we saw him, he was changing history for laughs; now he is terrified and out for revenge.

And there are some super performances here as well – Kevin Stoney as Mavic Chen is my favourite Who villain ever; Nicholas Courtney makes a first appearance, as Bret Vyon; Peter Butterworth returns as the Monk; apart from episode 7 and parts of episode 8, everyone is taking it very seriously and the whole thing is marvellous. And Tristram Carey’s music plus the sound effect of the Time Destructor make episode 12 brilliant to listen to, which is just as well since we can’t watch it.

Katarina will never make anyone’s list of Top Twenty Companions. Killed off a few minutes into her fifth episode, she is a rather one-note character, a young woman from a pre-industrial society who simply does not have the mental vocabulary to deal with the far future. Having said that, her story is a poignant one – she begins her travels with the Doctor thinking that she is already dead, and ends up killed by her first and only self-directed usage of future technology. As far as we can tell from the remaining material (one of the five episodes and a few other clips) Adrienne Hill played the part with charm and integrity, considering how little material the scripts gave her to work with. Hill appears (but does not speak) in one of the 1980s Children in Need Who reunions; she died in 1992.

Sara Kingdom is one of the best companions in the whole of Doctor Who, if also one of the shortest lived. Her journey with the Doctor and Steven is one of dealing with the betrayal of her ideals by the leader she once trusted and obeyed. She gets more character development in her seven episodes than the Fourth Doctor got in seven years. But she takes it too far – her death is a direct result of her disobedience, not of Mavic Chen but of the Doctor – motivated by the affection that has built up between them on their travels. Those who saw it assure us that her death scene was every bit as gripping as she deserved.

Jean Marsh must have been the highest profile actor to appear as a companion so far, other than perhaps William Russell, and after her probably only Bonnie Langford, Billie Piper and Catherine Tate exceeded her level of celebrity at the point they came on board the Tardis (others went on to great things of course). She also played major roles in Who stories both before (The Crusade) and after (Battlefield) this. The two Big Finish stories she has done as part of the Companion Chronicles series are good, and ingeniously get around the fact that we all know that the narrator is dead.

More heavy drama in The Massacre, another downbeat story in which lots of people are killed. Again, I was familiar with the Peter Purves audio narration and less so with the recon, which is very impressive given the limited source material, and also gives a sense of what we are missing – director Paddy Russell’s trademark of people creeping around the set hiding from each other. This is also the first “Doctor-lite” story, though of course Hartnell is in it as the Abbot. (Are the two middle episodes the only ones in the whole of Who which have no actual credit for the Doctor? And I don’t think he even speaks in ep 2.) The story keeps us guessing as to whether the Abbot is the Doctor in disguise, as Steven thinks and as is also hinted at by the Abbot’s failure to deliver effectively on his fearsome reputation. Then at the end of episode 3, he is dead in the street – and bearing in mind that we have lost Sara, Bret and Katarina in the last few weeks, it looks very grim for our hero. Yet episode 4 fairly effortlessly shifts focus, and once the political story line has its grim resolution established, it becomes all about the Doctor – will he take Anne with him? (No.) Whose reaction do we focus on after Steven storms out of the Tardis? (The Doctor’s.) Will he take Dodo with him? (Yes.) It’s back to the old mysterious time-traveller, working to his own set of rules which we do not know: “None of them could understand.” And this is entirely under the control of Donald Tosh, who drastically altered Lucarotti’s original script though had by now handed over as story editor to Gerry Davies.

The Ark is one of those stories which I did not like as much as before, watching in sequence this time. I don’t think it’s just because we can actually see it for a change (of the 21 previous episodes, only three from The Daleks’ Master Plan survive). The fundamental idea is sound and even a bit daring, but the script is very oddly paced and yet also cliched. (A security kitchen?) It is not surprising that neither the writer nor the director did another Who story, and I wonder how much morale was affected by John Wiles’ imminent departure as producer. One thing which always tells me that the director didn’t quite Get It is that the crowd scenes are lacking in dynamism – it’s interesting to see children in Who, but it’s odd to see them and their parents all standing around with their hands by their sides. Imison does better with the Monoids, in the first half at least (and I see that the lore claims they were his idea), but the script doen’t help. Both halves of the story suffer from over-long exposition and rushed climax. Poor Jackie Lane starts quite well but seems to gradually have the enthusiasm sucked out of her.

I think The Celestial Toymaker is the story I know least well of this run. It’s an odd one, commissioned as an innovative variation within John Wiles’ long-term plan, but broadcast as a peculiar debut for Innes Lloyd, and apparently needing a lot of rewriting by him and Gerry Davies from Brian Hayles’ original script (not that that deterred them from inviting him back) Making allowances for the lost visuals of the first three episodes, I liked it a little more this time round than on previous listens to the Peter Purves narration. It certainly gets marks for originality and everyone is performing well (Hartnell being absent for a lot of it). I had forgotten how cuddly Dodo and Steven get in the last episode, and she raises genuine questions about the ethics of what happens to the Toymaker’s minions which Stephen would prefer to ignore. Unfortunately the reconstruction of the missing three is not particularly inspiring – Loose Cannon did better in some cases where there is even less material to work with..

I have an unfashionable affection for The Gunfighters, and that has deepened a little now that I see it in the context of Wiles’ thwarted experimentation and Lloyd’s attempt to get a grip on the show. The sets and costumes look very good, the plot holds together, and John Alderson is excellent as Wyatt Earp (“Mr Werp”, as the Doctor calls him), though one can quibble about wobbly accents and performances from some ofthe other supporting cast. I have been suffering dental problems of my own recently, so felt sympathetic to the Doctor’s plight; note also his aversion to carrying guns, which resonates even in the most recent episode. But that is not all; thirty-five years before “Once More With Feeling”, Old Who experimented with a musical element. I really like the “Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon”; I think it makes an intriguing dramatic frame for the story, and teases the viewer with the question of whose story we are watching, and how. I know this is a minority view. Also nice to see Dodo and Steven being cuddly in the first episode, though poor Steven ends up just wearing a silly costume and getting captured (normally the role of the female companion).

I had listened to the audio releases of these stories a couple of years ago, and there was some discussion in comments about the changeover from Wiles/Tosh to Lloyd/Davis, which I didn’t really twig to on that occasion. This time round, with the surviving videos, and also in the context of having watched what’s left of the previous two years’ stories, it really jumped out at me. Wiles was I think ahead of his time; his Who stories are much more like those of the colour era than any other period of Hartnell. It clearly didn’t work for Hartnell or for the BBC hierarchy, but it works for me.

< 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 >

• reading_gibbon: Chapter XV: Early Christianity
  The growth of Christianity "was most effectually favoured and assisted by the five following causes: I. The inflexible, and, if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians, derived, it is true, from the Jewish religion, but purified from the narrow and unsocial spirit which, instead of inviting, had deterred the Gentiles from embracing the law of Moses. II. The doctrine of a future life, improved by every additional circumstance which could give weight and efficacy to that important truth. III. The miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church. IV. The pure and austere morals of the Christians. V. The union and discipline of the Christian republic, which gradually formed an independent and increasing state in the heart of the Roman empire."
  (tags: gibbon)

Someone recently posted an enquiry about British women sf novelists from before 1970, and I responded rather unhelpfully that Sylvia Anderson probably deserved more writing credits for Thunderbirds than she actually got (ie, co-author of the first episode, “Trapped in the Sky”). A very little more research (in particular, reading Nick Cooper and Keith Topping, and then scraping IMDB) allows me to add the following names to the list of female writers for British televised sf before 1970:

Hazel Adair, who along with Peter Ling created the soap operas Compact and Crossroads, but also earlier in her career co-wrote (with Ronald Marriott) a childrens’ sf series, Stranger from Space, the adventures of a Martian boy who has crashed on Earth and is befriended by a human boy, which had two series in 1951-2 and 1952-3 (shown as an insert into the magazine programme Whirligig).

Sheilah Ward, who was married to Peter Ling (himself the author of a Troughton-era Doctor Who story), wrote a 1958 children’s sf series for ITV, Time Is The Enemy (as well as a couple of episodes of The Avengers).

Evelyn Frazer, who wrote an sfnal play, “The Critical Point”, broadcast in 1957 and again in 1960, mixing cryogenics with police procedure. She also wrote Virus X, a 1962 play featuring a supervirus, and later in 1962 wrote a four-part series called The Monsters with Vincent Tilsley.

Marielaine Double has precisely one IMDB credit, as co-author of the 1965 Wednesday play Campaign for One, a “psychological space drama” according to Keith Topping.

Marghanita Laski, better known as a journalist and non-genre writer, but also author of a post-apocalypse play, The Offshore Island, which was broadcast in 1959.

Elaine Morgan, now better known for her advocacy of the aquatic ape hypothesis, wrote (among many other TV credits) Thunderbolt, an episode of R3, a drama series set in a secret British government research unit – the Bugs or Torchwood of its day.

Kate Wilhelm is not British, but her short story Andover and the Android was adapted by Bruce Stewart as a 1965 episode of Out of the Unknown. (The story was published in 1963 in a collection called The Mile-Long SpaceshipAndover and the Android, presumably to make the most of the TV tie-in.)

In 1966, the Doctor Who time slot was filled over the summer by an sf children’s detective series called Quick, Before They Catch Us, whose fourth and final story, “The Tungsten Ring”, was written by Margot Bennett and directed by Paddy Russell. Bennett is much better known as a crime writer, though one of her other books has the intriguing title of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation.

Finally, Keith Topping lists a couple more female writers of sfnal TV plays in the Thirty Minute Theatre strand: Dawn Pavitt, who co-wrote “The Isle is Full of Noises” with Terry Wale in 1965, and Charlotte Plimmer, who co-wrote “Standing by for Santa Claus” with Denis Plimmer in 1968. Both of them have a few other IMDB credits which may or may not be sfnal.

I am sure there are more. Hazel Adair in particular looks like she merits some further research.

Well, I think the best that can be said for the Big Finish audio of Mission to Magnus is that it makes me look forward to hearing all the rest of the BF audio plays I shall listen to this year, because they will be better. I commented a few months back that the novelisation of the unbroadcast story felt a bit padded; Philip Martin has stripped out the padding and got down to the bare essentials, and unfortunately the story still is not a very good one.

This is almost entirely the fault of the script. The introduction of yet another Time Lord with a strange past relationship to the Doctor was a repeated mistake of Sixth Doctor stories (from start to finish – Azrael, the Second Doctor, the Trial scenes) and it is not done any better here than in any of the other cases. The Ice Warriors’ plan is a silly one, astrophysically, and the Doctor appears to deal with it by essentially snapping his fingers. And the women-only planet, which is merely dull in the book version, is actually rather offensive here. (Not quite as bad as The Two Ronnies, but this is not saying much.)

Most of the cast give this rubbish their best efforts – the regulars, Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant; returning guest star Nadil Shaban as Sil; also I thought Susan Franklyn among the supporting cast was rather good (and Maggie Steed at least adequate). But Big Finish took the courageous step of getting child actors to play the child characters, and with the best will in the world, this experiment cannot be described as a roaring success. It is a real shame that Wally K. Daly could not be persuaded to liberate his script for The Ultimate Evil, as I think it would have lifted the quality of the Lost Stories season rather considerably.

First round – 30 days
First Doctor – William Hartnell
Season One – 1963-64
1/ An Unearthly Child (4)
2/ The Daleks (7)
3/ The Edge of Destruction (2)
4/ Marco Polo (7)
5/ The Keys of Marinus (6)
6/ The Aztecs (4)

Second round – 27 days
1/ The Sensorites (6)
2/ The Reign of Terror (6)
Season Two – 1964-65
3/ Planet of Giants (3)
4/ The Dalek Invasion of Earth (6)
5/ The Rescue (2)
6/ The Romans (4)

Third round – 28 days
1/ The Web Planet (6)
2/ The Crusade (4)
3/ The Space Museum (4)
4/ The Chase (6)
5/ The Time Meddler (4)
Season Three – 1965-66
6/ Galaxy 4 (4)

Fourth round – 33 days
0/ Mission to the Unknown (1)
1/ The Myth Makers (4)
2/ The Daleks’ Master Plan (12)
3/ The Massacre (4)
4/ The Ark (4)
5/ The Celestial Toymaker (4)
6/ The Gunfighters (4)

Fifth round – 26 days
1/ The Savages (4)
2/ The War Machines (4)
Season 4: 1966-67
3/ The Smugglers (4)
4/ The Tenth Planet (4)
Patrick Troughton
5/ The Power of the Daleks (6)
6/ The Highlanders (4)

Sixth Round – 29 days
1/ The Underwater Menace (4)
2/ The Moonbase (4)
3/ The Macra Terror (4)
4/ The Faceless Ones (6)
5/ The Evil of the Daleks (7)
Season 5: 1967-68
6/ The Tomb of the Cybermen (4)

Seventh round – 36 days
1/ The Abominable Snowmen (6)
2/ The Ice Warriors (6)
3/ The Enemy of the World (6)
4/ The Web of Fear (6)
5/ Fury from the Deep (6)
6/ The Wheel in Space (6)

Eighth round – 34 days
Season 6: 1968-69
1/ The Dominators (5)
2/ The Mind Robber (5)
3/ The Invasion (8)
4/ The Krotons (4)
5/ The Seeds of Death (6)
6/ The Space Pirates (6)

Ninth round – 39 days
1/ The War Games (10)
Jon Pertwee
Season 7: 1970
2/ Spearhead from Space (4)
3/ The Silurians (7)
4/ The Ambassadors of Death (7)
5/ Inferno (7)
Season 8: 1971
6/ Terror of the Autons (4)

Tenth round – 29 days
1/ The Mind of Evil (6)
2/ The Claws of Axos (4)
3/ Colony in Space (6)
4/ The Daemons (5)
Season 9: 1972
5/ Day of the Daleks (4)
6/ The Curse of Peladon (4)

Eleventh round – 32 days
1/ The Sea Devils (6)
2/ The Mutants (6)
3/ The Time Monster (6)
Season 10: 1972-73
4/ The Three Doctors (4)
5/ Carnival of Monsters (4)
6/ Frontier in Space (6)

Twelfth round – 32 days
1/ Planet of the Daleks (6)
2/ The Green Death (6)
Season 11: 1973-74
3/ The Time Warrior (4)
4/ Invasion of the Dinosaurs (6)
5/ Death to the Daleks (4)
6/ The Monster of Peladon (6)

Thirteenth round – 26 days
1/ Planet of the Spiders (6)
Tom Baker
Season 12: 1974-75
2/ Robot (4)
3/ The Ark in Space (4)
4/ The Sontaran Experiment (2)
5/ Genesis of the Daleks (6)
6/ Revenge of the Cybermen (4)

Fourteenth round – 26 days
Season 13: 1975-76
1/ Terror of the Zygons (4)
2/ Planet of Evil (4)
3/ Pyramids of Mars (4)
4/ The Android Invasion (4)
5/ The Brain of Morbius (4)
6/ The Seeds of Doom (6)

Fifteenth round – 26 days
Season 14: 1976-77
1/ The Masque of Mandragora (4)
2/ The Hand of Fear (4)
3/ The Deadly Assassin (4)
4/ The Face of Evil (4)
5/ The Robots of Death (4)
6/ The Talons of Weng-Chiang (6)

Sixteenth round – 26 days
Season 15: 1977-78
1/ Horror of Fang Rock (4)
2/ The Invisible Enemy (4)
3/ Image of the Fendahl (4)
4/ The Sunmakers (4)
5/ Underworld (4)
6/ The Invasion of Time (6)

Seventeenth round – 26 days
Season 16: 1978-79
1/ The Ribos Operation (4)
2/ The Pirate Planet (4)
3/ The Stones of Blood (4)
4/ The Androids of Tara (4)
5/ The Power of Kroll (4)
6/ The Armageddon Factor (6)

Eighteenth round – 26 days
Season 17: 1979-80
1/ Destiny of the Daleks (4)
2/ City of Death (4)
3/ The Creature from the Pit (4)
4/ Nightmare of Eden (4)
5/ The Horns of Nimon (4)
6/ (Shada) (6)

Nineteenth round – 24 days
Season 18: 1980-81
1/ The Leisure Hive (4)
2/ Meglos (4)
3/ Full Circle (4)
4/ State of Decay (4)
5/ Warriors Gate (4)
6/ The Keeper of Traken (4)

Twentieth round – 22 days
1/ Logopolis (4)
2/ K9 and Company (2)
Peter Davison
Season 19: 1982
3/ Castrovalva (4)
4/ Four to Doomsday (4)
5/ Kinda (4)
6/ The Visitation (4)

Twenty-first round – 22 days
1/ Black Orchid (2)
2/ Earthshock (4)
3/ Time-Flight (4)
Season 20: 1983
4/ Arc of Infinity (4)
5/ Snakedance (4)
6/ Mawdryn Undead (4)

Twenty-second round – 20 days
1/ Terminus (4)
2/ Enlightment (4)
3/ The King’s Demons (2)
4/ The Five Doctors (4)
Season 21: 1984
5/ Warriors of the Deep (4)
6/ The Awakening (2)

Twenty-third round – 24 days
1/ Frontios (4)
2/ Resurrection of the Daleks (4)
3/ Planet of Fire (4)
4/ The Caves of Androzani (4)
Colin Baker
5/ The Twin Dilemma (4)
Season 22: 1985
6/ Attack of the Cybermen (4)

Twenty-fourth round – 27 days
1/ Vengeance on Varos (4)
2/ Mark of the Rani (4)
3/ The Two Doctors (6)
3.5/ In a Fix With Sontarans (1)
4/ Timelash (4)
5/ Revelation of the Daleks (4)
Season 23: 1986 (“The Trial of a Time Lord”)
6/ The Mysterious Planet (4)

Twenty-fifth round – 21 days
1/ Mindwarp (4)
2/ Terror of the Vervoids (4)
3/ The Ultimate Foe (2)
Sylvester McCoy
Season 24: 1987
4/ Time and the Rani (4)
5/ Paradise Towers (4)
6/ Delta and the Bannermen (3)

Twenty-sixth round – 21 days
1/ Dragonfire (3)
Season 25: 1988-89
2/ Remembrance of the Daleks (4)
3/ The Happiness Patrol (3)
4/ Silver Nemesis (3)
5/ The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (4)
Season 26: 1989
6/ Battlefield (4)

Twenty-seventh round – 16 days
1/ Ghost Light (3)
2/ The Curse of Fenric (4)
3/ Survival (3)
4/ Dimensions in Time (1)
5/ The TV Movie (4)
6/ The Curse of Fatal Death (1)

Twenty-eighth round
1/ Death Comes to Time (6)
2/ Real Time (3)
3/ Shada (6)
4/ Scream of the Shalka (3)
Christopher Eccleston
Series 1: 2005
5/ Rose
6/ End of the World

1/ The Unquiet Dead
2/ Aliens of London • World War III
3/ Dalek
4/ The Long Game
5/ Father’s Day
6/ The Empty Child • The Doctor Dances

1/ Boom Town
2/ Bad Wolf • The Parting of the Ways
David Tennant
Series 2: 2005-2006
2.5/ Pudsey cutaway
3/ The Christmas Invasion
3.5/ Attack of the Graske
4/ New Earth
5/ Tooth and Claw
6/ School Reunion

1/ The Girl in the Fireplace
2/ Rise of the Cybermen • The Age of Steel
3/ The Idiot’s Lantern
4/ The Impossible Planet • The Satan Pit
5/ Love & Monsters
6/ Fear Her

1/ Army of Ghosts • Doomsday
Torchwood Season 1
2/ Everything Changes
3/ Day One
4/ Ghost Machine
5/ Cyberwoman
6/ Small Worlds

1/ Countrycide
2/ Greeks Bearing Gifts
3/ They Keep Killing Suzie
4/ Random Shoes
5/ Out of Time
6/ Combat

1/ Captain Jack Harkness
2/ End of Days
Series 3: 2006-2007
3/ The Runaway Bride
Sarah Jane Adventures pilot
4/ Invasion of the Bane
Series 3
5/ Smith and Jones
6/ The Shakespeare Code

1/ Gridlock
2/ Daleks in Manhatten • Evolution of the Daleks
3/ The Lazarus Experiment
4/ 42
5/ Human Nature • The Family of Blood
6/ Blink

1/ Utopia • The Sound of Drums • Last of the Time Lords
2/ The Infinite Quest
Sarah Jane series 1
3/ Revenge of the Slitheen
4/ Eye of the Gorgon
5/ Warriors of Kudlak
6/ Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?

1/ The Lost Boy
1.5/ Time Crash
Series 4: 2007-2008
2/ Voyage of the Damned
Torchwood Series 2
3/ Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
4/ Sleeper
5/ To the Last Man
6/ Meat

1/ Adam
2/ Reset
3/ Dead Man Walking
4/ A Day in the Death
5/ Something Borrowed
6/ From Out of the Rain

1/ Adrift
2/ Fragments
3/ Exit Wounds
Series 4: 2007-2008
4/ Partners in Crime
5/ Fires of Pompeii
6/ Planet of The Ood

1/ The Sontaran Strategem • The Poison Sky
2/ The Doctor’s Daughter
3/ The Unicorn and the Wasp
4/ Silence in the Library • Forest of the Dead
5/ Midnight
6/ Turn Left

1/ The Stolen Earth • Journey’s End
Sarah Jane season Two
2/ The Last Sontaran
3/ The Day of the Clown
4/ Secrets of the Stars
5/ The Mark of the Berserker
6/ The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith

1/ Enemy of the Bane
Specials: 2008-2010
2/ The Next Doctor
2.5/ Sarah Jane: From Raxacoricofallapretorius with love
3/ Planet of the Dead
4/ Torchwood: Children of Earth
Sarah Jane Series 3
5/ Prisoner of the Judoon
6/ The Mad Woman in the Attic

1/ The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith
2/ The Eternity Trap
3/ Mona Lisa’s Revenge
4/ Doctor Who: The Waters of Mars
5/ Sarah Jane: The Gift
6/ Dreamland

1/ The End of Time (2)

a) unread sf, in order of entry to LibraryThing:

1. Irish tales of terror, ed by Jim McGarry
2. Forbidden Acts, ed by Nancy A. Collins
3. Seasons of Plenty by Colin Greenland
4. Mother of Plenty by Colin Greenland
5. The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe

b) unread sf in order of LibraryThing popularity:

1. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
2. The Wandering Fire by Guy Gavriel Kay
3. The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay
4. Kushiel’s Scion by Jacqueline Carey
5. Heart of the Sea by Nora Roberts

c) unread sf in order of popularity here (obviously will rejig this ordering to take account of series order):

1. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett
2. The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay
3. The Wandering Fire by Guy Gavriel Kay
4. Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones
5. The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones

d) unread non-sf fiction, in order of entry to LibraryThing:

1. Thirteen Steps Down by Ruth Rendell
2. Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin
3. Wandering Star by J.M.G. Le Clezio
4. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser
5. Njal’s Saga

e) unread non-sf fiction, in order of LibraryThing popularity:

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
3. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
4. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
5. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

f) unread non-sf fiction, in order of popularity here:

1. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
2. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
3. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
4. The Crucible by Arthur Miller
5. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

g) unread non-fiction, in order of entry to LibraryThing:

1. The Two Faces of Islam by Stephen Schwartz
2. Radical Islams Rules edited by Paul Marshall
3. Untold Stories by Alan Bennett
4. Half-life of a Zealot by Swanee Hunt
5. The provinces of the Roman Empire from Caesar to Diocletian by Theodor Mommsen

h) unread non-fiction, in order of LibraryThing popularity:

1. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
2. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama
3. The Koran
4. On the Nature of the Universe by Lucretius
5. The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

i) unread non-fiction, in order of popularity here:

1. The Panda’s Thumb by Stephen Jay Gould
2. The Language of the Night by Ursula K. Le Guin
3. Profiles of the future by Arthur C. Clarke
4. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
5. The Koran

j) books already read, in order of LibraryThing popularity

1. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
3. Northern Lights by Philip Pullman
4. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

k) Hugo-winning novels that I haven’t previously reviewed on-line:

1. The Uplift War by David Brin
2. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
3. The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
4. Cordelia’s Honor (for Barrayar) by Lois McMaster Bujold
5. A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

l) unread New Adventures of Doctor Who (new list)

0. Timewyrm: Genesys
   Timewyrm: Exodus
   Timewyrm: Apocalypse
   Timewyrm: Revelation
1. Cat’s Cradle: Times Crucible by Marc Platt
2. Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel
3. Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark by Andrew Hunt
4. Nightshade by Mark Gatiss
   Love and War
5. Transit by Ben Aaronovitch

m) unread Eighth Doctor Adventures (new list)

0. The Eight Doctors
1. Vampire Science by Kate Orman
2. The Bodysnatchers by Mark Morris
   Genocide
3. War of the Daleks by John Peel
   Alien Bodies
4. Kursaal by Peter Anghelides
5. Option Lock by Justin Richards

n) other unread Doctor Who books, in order of LibraryThing popularity

1. Wooden Heart by Martin Day
2. The Pirate Loop by Simon Guerrier
3. Forever Autumn by Mark Morris
4. Sick Building by Paul Magrs
5. Wishing Well by Trevor Baxendale

o) Ian Rankin books, starting with the Rebus novels, in series order:

1. Mortal Causes
2. Let It Bleed
3. Black and Blue
4. The Hanging Garden
5. Dead Souls

p) books by writers of colour, in order of entry into LibraryThing:

1. Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman
2. Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
3. The Emperor’s Babe by Bernardine Evaristo
4. Out by Natsuo Kirino
5. Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

q) books on the shelves at end 2005, otherwise not accounted for, going backwards in LT entry order:

1. Wheel Of Engaged Buddhism by Kenneth Kraft
2. Ta Hsueh and Chung Yung
3. Mr. Bloomfield’s Orchard by Nicholas P. Money
4. The Twilight of Atheism by Alister McGrath
5. Saint Therese of Lisieux by Kathryn Harrison

r) books acquired since end 2005, otherwise not accounted for, in LT entry order:

0. Year’s Best SF 8, edited by David G. Hartwell
1. Who Saved Bosnia by Vitomir Miles Raguz
2. The Portadown News by Newton Emerson
3. The Cyprus question and the EU by Andreas Theophanous
4. Peacebuilding and Civil Society in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ten Years after Dayton
5. A Different Kingdom by Paul Kearney

Plus whatever else should take my fancy.

As it happens, this morning I was re-watching the first episode of The Gunfighters, a generally forgotten 1966 story where the Tardis lands in Tombstone, Arizona, specifically at the OK Corral, and William Hartnell’s Doctor is offered a gun for self-defence by the local dentist, Doc Holliday. As with Tennant’s Doctor this evening, he refuses to take it at first, but (in rather more comic than dramatic terms) does so in the end. I don’t know if it was a deliberate reference, but pleasing all the same.

…that was better than I had feared. RTD has managed to write a decent finale.

Once we had disposed of the actual plot, about 40 minutes in, it was a rather affecting farewell to the Tennant era. I did find something in my eye when it turned out that Jessica Hynes’ character was called Verity Newman. And again when the New Year encounter turned out to be at the start of that momentous year, 2005.

Broadening out a bit, I think it was entirely reasonable to give Ten a chance to say goodbye to his peeps. This happened in virtual reality for Four and Five as well, but it is much more satisfactory to have the next step in the companions’ lives (as happened for Two, just before the Time Lords killed him).

It was also rather beautiful to have the deliberate echoing of Five’s dying spaceship landing (and perhaps we will watch Caves of Androzani again in tribute over the weekend). Tennant was certainly copying Davison’s grimace. Of course, absorbing radiation was the killing factor for Three and Nine as well.

Anyway, plenty of loose ends left. Who was the mysterious female Time Lord? Susan? Romana? Iris Wildthyme? River Song? Are the Time Lords (who are, as I thought, now Evil) dead forever? And the Master?

Not long to wait, anyway. Good to see Matt Smith get a decent lead-in as well.

(hat-tip to the lovely Alex.)

My 2009 reading ended on a high note, with Edward Gibbon’s short and entertaining autobiography, telling the story of his life and of how he wrote the Decline and Fall.

(Incidentally I shall be writing up the most controversial chapters, XV and XVI, on early Christianity on tomorrow and next week. You can sample them here and here – they feature some of his most savage and memorable sarcasm.)

The two chapters in which Gibbon describes the completion, publication and reception of the Decline and Fall ought to be essential reading for anyone planning a writing career. In particular, his reflections on completing the twenty-year project are poignant:

It was on the night of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last line of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias . I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.

There is lots more here as well: his political career (which was entirely the result of Gibbon’s recepit of patronage – two different seats in parliament for pocket boroughs, and a junior government position which appears to have involved no actual duties in return for a large salary), his experience of Oxford (and some of his trenchant criticisms of the Oxbridge system remain valid), his reflections on living in Lausanne rather than London, his experience as an officer in the militia. Gibbon comes across as, of course, tremendously intelligent, but also rather modest with it: he is conscious of some of the flaws of Decline and Fall, but claims that his own satisfaction at a job well done is more important than public praise or condemnation, though at the same time praise is always welcome. He expresses the vague hope, in 1791, that people will still read his work in a hundred years’ time. I was reading this aloud to Anne as she drove us home from England yesterday, and I found I had got something in my eye, also affecting my throat, as I got to the end:

The present is a fleeting moment, the past is no more; and our prospect of futurity is dark and doubtful. This day may possibly be my last: but the laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular, still allow about fifteen years…. The warm desires, the long expectations of youth, are founded on the ignorance of themselves and of the world: they are gradually damped by time and experience, by disappointment and possession; and after the middle season the crowd must be content to remain at the foot of the mountain; while the few who have climbed the summit aspire to descend or expect to fall. In old age, the consolation of hope is reserved for the tenderness of parents, who commence a new life in their children; the faith of enthusiasts, who sing Hallelujahs above the clouds; and the vanity of authors, who presume the immortality of their name and writing.

The Penguin edition is not the text made famous by Gibbon’s friend Lord Sheffield, but a new (well, 1983) treatment of the manuscripts by Penguin’s editor Betty Radice, who steps from behind the curtain and explains her methodology in an interesting introduction. Well worth getting.

I read slightly fewer books last year than in 2008, 342 rather than 374. This was partly due to reading fewer Doctor Who novelisations (having read almost all of them last year) and also due to a deliberate choice of reading more classics of non-sf literature. For most of the year I was still reading books at an almost neurotic rate; I have slowed down since September, partly because I rejigged my reading lists to take it more slowly, and partly because I started a couple of other projects (watching Doctor Who from the beginning, weekly chapter of Gibbon) which ate into reading time.

Scores on the doors:
Total pages read 100,000 (to nearest 1,000), which is roughly 270 a day. My commute is often an hour and a half each way, and I am a fast reader
68 (20%) by women (ie female author or editor credited on front cover; does not include female pseudonym of male author), up from 2008’s 46 (12%)
16 (5%) by writers of colour (not terribly impressive but double my previous rate and three times 2008’s 1.6%)
36 (11%) rereads (italicised below)
48 added to LT catalogue in 2005; 6 in 2006, 3 in 2007, 79 in 2008. 65 had been on the slelves for more than a year before I read them.

Non-fiction

Total 88 (26%) in 2009, up slightly from 72 (19%) in 2008.

Best in category: Survival In Auschwitz, by Primo Levi – a searing account of an incredible situation.

Also excellent: Gibbon’s Memoirs, The Road from Coorain, Emma’s War: Love, Betrayal and Death in the Sudan, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Collapse, EU Accession Dynamics And Conflict Resolution: Catalysing Peace Or Consolidating Partition In Cyprus?, About Time 3: The Unauthorized Guide to Doctor Who (Seasons 7 to 11), 2nd edition, Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale, Target: A History of the Target Doctor Who Books

Very very good: Rocks of Ages, Shakespeare’s Wife, Galileo’s Daughter, The Lyncher in Me, The Dissolution of the Religious Orders in Ireland under Henry VIII, Early Belfast,  Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus, Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know, Fall Out: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to The Prisoner, From Genocide to Continental War: The Congolese Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa

Worst in category: Blue Like Jazz, an uninspiring articulation of liberal Christianity

Fiction (other than sf and comics)

Total 57 (18%) in 2009, substantially up from 25 (7%) in 2008 due to deliberate policy of reading more classics.

Best in Category: Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck.

Also excellent: To Kill a Mockingbird, Lolita, Catch 22, Nature Girl, Oedipus Rex

Very very good: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, The Go-Between, To the Lighthouse, As I Lay Dying, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Middlesex, Song of Solomon, The Angel Makers, Mr Singh Has Disappeared, The Secret Garden, The Story of Tracy Beaker, The New Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction

Worst book I read all year: Angels and Demons, the book which made Dan Brown’s name. It is slightly better written than The Da Vinci Code, but this really isn’t saying much.

SF (other than Who and comics, but including some ancient literature)

Total 78 (23%) in 2009, up slightly from 71 (19%) in 2008.

Best in category: Very difficult to choose between On the Beach, Threshold (vol 1 of the collected Zelazny), The Night Sessions and another Ken MacLeod novel, The Restoration Game, as yet unpublished . Probably in the end I would go for On The Beach.

Also excellent: The Hobbit, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Lord of Light, The War of the Worlds, Divine Comedy

Very very good: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, This Immortal, The Man in the High Castle, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Big Time,  A Million Open Doors, Kindred, Wizard of Oz, The Blind Assassin, The Graveyard Book, Anathem, Black Juice, The Iliad, The Golden Ass

Worst in category: Bard IV: Ravens Gathering, by Keith Taylor. Admittedly I only managed the  first 20 pages so it may have improved.

Comics

Total 28 (8%) in 2009, substantially up from last year’s 7 (2%) because of reading complete Fables and also the Hugo nominees.

Best in category: Persepolis 2 and Shortcomings

Very very good: With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child v. 1

Worst in category: Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic – I know it has fans, but simply did not strike me as very impressive.

Shakespeare Plays (in most cases rating refers to both text and Arkangel performance)

Total 19 (6%) in 2009 compared to 20 (also 5%) in 2008; this is one category that will not appear in 2010’s list!

Best in category: Has to be Hamlet!

Also excellent: Twelfth Night, Macbeth

Very very good: Othello, King Lear

Worst in category: The Two Noble Kinsmen

Doctor Who Spinoff Fiction (other than comics and audio plays)

Total 70 (19%, substantially down from last year when I read most of the novelisations). The Doctor, or spinoff series, is given in brackets.

Best in category: Gary Russell’s Beautiful Chaos, which has the Tenth Doctor, Wilf and Donna teaming up against the return of a classic-era enemy.

Very good: Farewell Great Macedon (1), Doctor Who – Ghosts of N-Space (3), Romance of Crime (4), Sands of Time (5), Zeta Major (5), Millennial Rites (6), Only Human (9), The Eyeless (10), Snowglobe 7 (10), The Day of the Troll (10), Decalog [first volume], Downtime, Border Princes (Torchwood), Slow Decay (Torchwood), The Sin Eaters (Torchwood), Beyond the Sun (Bernice Summerfield)

Worst in category: Byzantium! (1)

To round the year off, notes on audio plays and films.

Audio plays (including Doctor Who)

Best in category: The Lord of the Rings, the definitive BBC version.

Also excellent: The Mahogany Murderers (a Doctor Who spinoff with Jago and Litefoot from The Talons of Weng-Chiang), Moths Ate My “Doctor Who” Scarf (a confessional autobiography, adapted from the stage show), Kaldor City: The Prisoner (a brilliant two-hander between Paul Darrow and Peter Miles)

Very very good: The War of the Worlds (Original 1938 Radio Adaptaion), Sympathy for the Devil (alternate Doctor Who story), The Doomwood Curse (6th Doctor and Charlie), The Bride of Peladon (5th Doctor, Peri and Erimem), Death in Blackpool (8th Doctor and Lucie)

Worst in Category: The Poison Seas, a Bernice Summerfield story that was probably OK but marred by poor production.

Films:

One of my 2010 resolutions is to watch more films and to track them better!

Wii Fit Plus tells me that my BMI is in the ideal range, and that I have the body of a 28-year-old.

(It did not say which 28-year-old.)

(You can guess which New Year’s resolution I have been implementing.)

Happy new year everyone!

I’m still working up my review post of 2009’s books, but here is the full list in poll form. Which have you read?

Made it home from our three days in England, various family members suffering from various bugs. I think for once I may go to bed early. Have a good New Year, all.

Non-fiction 4

Non-genre fiction 3

sf (non-Who) 2

Doctor Who etc (not comics) 5

Comics 2

~4,300 pages
4 by women (van der Wal, Hodgson Burnett, Jenkins, Moore; but not ‘Tara Samms’); total of 68/341 (19.9%) for 2009
1 by PoC (Jenkins)
Owned for more than a year: The Jesuits, The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Second Annual Collection
Rereads: None

Help me decide what to read next year – I did this last year and the year before and found it very useful! (I will post a poll of the books I have read this year tomorrow, all being well; there are still a couple I may finish in the meantime.)

I included a text box for recommendations for or against particular books when I did this last year, but I think it is better to invite any such remarks to be posted as comments.

A very approachable introduction to the history of the Dutch language, aimed at undergraduates. It starts with Indo-European and Gothic and then follows the development of Dutch from the point where it is identifiable (700-1000 AD) to the present. One point that I was not left clear about: how exactly the linguistic frontier between Germanic and Latin became established, and when – was it before or after the fall of the Roman Empire?

The more recent history of Dutch has much more controversy and politics than I had realised. The first attempts to standardise came at exactly the same time as the partition of the Dutch-speaking area between the Spanish and the independent Dutch spate; the standard language therefore started based on the dialect of Holland (ie the province of that name) but with substantial input from Brabant. A fascinating map much later in the book shows that the areas where locals habitually drop the final “n” in infinitives and plurals, etc, reflects this early alliance – the “n” is pronounced in Zeeland and the Belgian provinces of East and West Flanders; also to the northwest, everywhere above a line going roughly from Alkmaar to Arnhem; and in patches of both Limburgs. But it is silent in Antwerp, Brussels and Leuven, as in The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht. As a Dutch student, this is practically the first exception you are taught for the language’s generally phonetic spelling; it is certainly the most common such exception.

Scientists like Stevin and the Huygens family made Dutch an international language of knowledge, as well as of commerce. Much of the following centuries are taken up with debates about how far the written language should reflect its spoken form, mainly resolved in favour of the demotic. It took the French-educated rulers some time to catch up – French was the court language as late as Queen Emma, who was Regent until 1898. It was also, incredibly, not until 1898 that Dutch was recognised as an official language alongside French in the relevant parts of Belgium (not surprisingly the chapter on the Flemish language struggle is one of the longest).

I was a little uncomfortable with the way that the authors slip rather easily and unconsciously into the dialectic of territorial conquest: most of Flanders is now secure, and losses in the Brussels area have been stabilised; Frisian is under control; Indonesia and South Africa (and, cough, New York) may have been lost, but at least the Caribbean is still there (though it seems likely to me that Dutch is an elite language in that last case, with most people speaking Papiamento or other creoles). But I enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it; Dutch speakers who want to learn more about the language will find it of interest.

This came out in 2005, the year of the Glasgow Worldcon, and I guess that because I felt I had thoroughly chewed over that year’s short fiction in the Hugo process I didn’t urgently need to read this. That was wrong: Dozois has as ever pulled together an excellent set of stories, full of variety of approach and length. As noted below, I had read only the few stories which got shortlisted for the major awards, and one other which I had seen in its original anthology. Of the stories new to me, the standouts were Stephen Baxter’s “Mayflower II” – I often find his prose style annoying but this time it worked – and Walter Jon Williams’ “Investments”, a hard sf story with softer edges. But they are all good, and I should get back into the habit of reading the “Best of the Year” anthologies as soon as they come out.

The lack of overlap with the 2005 (and 2006 Nebula) award nominations is striking. Dozois includes three of the Hugo novelette nominees, and three novelettes and one novella which made it to the final Nebula ballots, but not “The Fairy Handbag” which won both Hugo and Nebula – indeed not a single winner in any category. (ETA: points out that in fairness “The Fairy Handbag” was not science fiction. But the other winners by and large were.)

A well-written account for an Irish audience of the characteristics of ten European countries – Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. In each case Connelly has done some of the essential academic background reading, and interviews locals (and in the earlier chapters also Irish emigrants) to flesh out what makes the Poles Polish, the Germans German, and so on. In addition, he is honest about the fact that the Irish perception of many of these countries is mediated by English media (there is a painful scene in Brentwood with a German standup comedian). I felt he was particularly good on Germany and France, though rather weaker on Italy (where he spends too much time on Sicily). The one country on his list that I haven’t visited myself is Poland, and I learned a lot from his chapter on it (though the main point is to go and read Norman Davies’ book). If Connelly’s journalism is as good as this, then RTÉ have an important asset – not just for the domestic Irish audience, but for explaining Europe better to the English-speaking world (a job which the British media dismally fails to do).

• FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Odds of Airborne Terror
  How likely is it that your flight will be attacked? Roughly one chance in 10 million, according to Nate Silver.
  (tags: war)
• Sesame Street – Monsterpiece Theater: Waiting for Elmo
  (tags: funny youtube)
• God bless Twitter
  Pete Birks makes a good point about how Eurostar’s problems demonstrate that the public are increasingly gaining access to mass media as producers
  (tags: internet twitter)

A few months back I did a poll on books published in 1959, 1909, 1859, 1809, 1759, 1609 and 1509. For the publications to be commemorated in 2010, I found the pickings much slimmer for the older set of anniversaries, but on the other hand 1960 appears to have been a rather good year (indeed, deserving a poll of its own). Here are the top books from 1910 and 1860 (again ranked by LibraryThing popularity).

(Yes, I know that When the Sleeper Wakes was originally serialised in 1899, but I am assured that The Sleeper Wakes of 1910 is very different.)

I’m in the middle of Framley Parsonage at the moment.