The Unionist parties have selected a joint candidate for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, who will thus have the backing of the DUP, UUP and Conservatives. This is the first time that there has been a single Unionist candidate in the constituency since 1997.

The lucky candidate, Rodney Connor, used to be Chief Executive of Fermanagh Council. Recruiting public officials to Unionist politics has sometimes ended unhappily in this part of the world. Sitting MP Michelle Gildernew of Sinn Féin is also being challenged by former TV journalist Fearghal McKinney of the SDLP, and by former history teacher Vasundhara Kamble (originally from Mumbai) of the Alliance Party.

The UUP/Conservative alliance was supposed to deliver non-sectarian politics; not a lot of evidence of that in the implementation.

asks if I can identify this story. I can’t, so I turn it over to the collective wisdom of Livejournal:

Genre: Sci-fi, feminist, could be authored by Sheri Tepper although I have read all the synopses I can find of her major works and it doesn’t seem to be there.

Imagine the scene: we are a human-like (possibly human) race on an alien planet, but we’ve been here for ages and lost touch with the technology that brought us here. That’s all a dim legend. We live in cliffs, in tunnels and holes we dig/bore. There are some strange taboos and real dangers: never leave the cliffs/go outside at night, don’t ask questions about girls who go missing.

Cutting to the chase: the plot centres around the revelation of an obscene coming-of-age ceremony for girls, where they are chained down outside the cliffs and left to the mercy of the rather horrible flying/insectoid? aliens.

Any thoughts?

I don’t know Alan Bennett’s work all that well; I think the only other book of his I have read is the previous non-fiction collection, Writing Home, and I’ve seen a very few of his plays – The Madness of King George, The Insurance Man, a student production of Getting On, probably a couple of others; and really really enjoyed The Uncommon Reader. But it doesn’t really matter; these are memoirs of a shy English writer born in Leeds in the mid-1930s and looking back on his life from the years around the turn of the century. Bennett has become something of a national institution, though he would hate to be described as such, and writes here about why he turned down a knighthood in 1996 (“it didn’t suit me”).

The two most effective pieces in the book are the very long opening piece about his mother’s mental illness and the rest of his extended family, particularly her sisters (one of whom died after wandering out of a mental hospital; Bennett himself found her body), and the rather shorter closing piece about his own, so far successful, battle with bowel cancer, a legacy of his father’s side of the family. In between are long, amusing extracts from his diaries between 1996 and 2004, and various other pieces mostly about the arts in Britain and his own work which didn’t appeal to me as much but are, as usual with Bennett, engaging and often bitterly funny. Recommended.

This novel in the New Adventures of Doctor Who series is in fact downloadable from the BBC website here in various formats, with added comments by Mark Gatiss from 2006 (after his TV stories The Unquiet Dead and The Idiot’s Lantern had been broadcast).

The setting is a familiar Whovian one (most recently seen in The Eleventh Hour): rural England, alien menace, the Doctor sorts it out. To be specific, we’re in a Yorkshire village in December 1968; Gatiss packs in a lot of detail, including some memorable characters – the staff of the local radio observatory; the young man who develops a relationship with Ace; the elderly actor who used to play Professor Nightshade on telly (a mixture between Quatermass and the First Doctor). Gatiss says in the notes that he was trying to write a Who book that really belonged more in the horror genre; it works for me.

The next New Adventure in sequence is Paul Cornell’s Love and War, which I read a year and a half ago (and greatly enjoyed); but I shall skip it for now and go on to Ben Aaronovitch’s Transit – I am not a particular fan of Aaronovitch’s writing, but let’s see if this will bring me round.

The UUP leader, Sir Reg Empey, is to stand in South Antrim. (See discussion on Slugger O’Toole here and here.) On the numbers, this is the most winnable DUP seat for the UUP, but there were problems with the originally selected UUP candidate…

East Belfast: DUP 1-4, 4-1 UCUNF
North Belfast: DUP 2-7, SF 5-2
South Belfast: SDLP 5-4, DUP 2-1, UCUNF 5-2
West Belfast: SF 1-500
East Antrim: DUP 1-6, UCUNF 6-1
North Antrim: DUP 2-5, TUV 7-4
South Antrim: DUP 2-5, UCUNF 5-2
North Down: Sylvia Hermon 1-3, UCUNF 2-1
South Down: SDLP 1-5, SDLP 3-1
Fermanagh and South Tyrone: SF 2-7, DUP 11-2, UCUNF also 11-2
Foyle: SDLP 1-5, SF 3-1
Lagan Valley: DUP 1-10, UCUNF 6-1
East Londonderry: DUP 1-6, UCUNF 7-1
Mid Ulster: SF 1-100
Newry and Armagh: SF 1-20, SDLP 8-1
Strangford: DUP 8-11, UCUNF evens
West Tyrone: SF 1-50
Upper Bann: DUP 4-6, UCUNF 2-1, SF 7-1

(Only odds more likely than 10-1 included)

Very few of the bookmakers seem to be offering odds for the NI seats, and only Ladbroke’s so far is doing so for all 18.

Interesting to note that the six fifth-season stories in this run all have six episodes, and in all cases there was certainly scope for some judicious trimming. (I started the fifth season last time with Tomb of the Cybermen, which has four episodes.)

I’ve never been quite sure about The Abominable Snowmen. As so often with this era, we have to form a judgement on the basis of one surviving episode and the many surviving audio tapes. On the one hand, it is an interesting innovation on the base-under-siege storyline to make the base a Tibetan monastery; the location filming is good; the monsters are scary (both the big violent Yeti and the sinister disembodied Intelligence); and Wolfe Morris in particular is great as the ancient Padmasambhava and the evil presence possessing him. But (and I think I’ll be saying this a lot of the six-parters) it is an episode or two too long, and Travers and the monks keep on changing their minds about the Doctor or (in Travers’ case) running off up the mountain mainly to keep the story going.

This story does mark a new and largely positive portrayal of religion in Who. Up to now, we have had squabbling sectarians (The Crusade, The Massacre), deluded cultists (The Aztecs, The Underwater Menace) and religious buildings whose ostensible custodians are using them for another purpose (the Monk in The Time Meddler, the churchwarden in The Smugglers). But these Tibetan monks are sincere, not deluded; and while their leader may have been deceived by the Great Intelligence, their initial encounter was on one of Padmasambhava’s routine trips to the Astral Plane; and the meditation prayer actually works to ward off mind control. I shall start tracking this more systematically, I think.

I really enjoyed The Ice Warriors, though for once I was unable to locate a full recon of episodes 2 and 3 and so combined listening to the Fraser Hines narration with the cut down 17-minute edition of both. Yes, we have another base under siege; but what a base! The uniforms are particularly eye-melting (as Jamie remarks to Victoria at one point), and the interplay between Peter Barkworth’s dysfunctional leader Clent, Peter Sallis’ dissident scientist Elric (!) Penley, and Wendy Gifford’s Miss Garrett with her competing loyalties, is all very watchable. Although Hayles doesn’t overtly tackle the supernatural here, he does have the local humans slavishly worshipping their computer, rather than making their own judgemen.ts. Into this delicate situation blunder first the Ice Warriors and then the Tardis crew. My brother and I once got Bernard Bresslaw’s autograph on the strength of this story, which we hadn’t even seen back in 1982 or whenever it was. He does a great alien menace, establishing them for the next three stories they are in.

There are some unfortunate plot holes – exactly what is the geographical range of the Ioniser, or the story? The base, the spaceship, the Tardis and Penley and Storr’s hideout all seem to be within two minutes’ walk of each other. Jamie’s paralysis, apparently severe, is cured almost without comment, and Victoria is packed off to the Tardis half way through the last episode (presumably to get it right way up) and not seen again. And the Ice Warriors make the mistake also made by so many enemies of the Doctor of imprisoning him somewhere with easy access to their own weaponry. But it is a fun ride.

After a run of bases under siege by alien monsters, The Enemy of the World is a refreshing change of format, though not of setting – as with The Ice Warriors, we are in a not too distant future Earth with a technocratic government and natural disasters. While the previous story drew a lesson from over-reliance on the computer’s leadership, Enemy of the World critiques over-dependence on the judgement of a single human being – even if he happens to look like the Doctor. As so often with a David Whitaker script, there is more going on than meets the eye: consider Salamander as an alternative Doctor (which he actually tries to become in the closing minutes of the story); consider also the symbolism of the underground base, a store of subconscious knowledge and destructive actions.

The guest cast are very watchable – the future Castellan Spandrell as Denes, Colin Douglas as Bruce, and also Mary Peach as Astrid and Carmen Munro as Fariah being particularly strong supporting women characters (the latter getting I think the first decent speaking role for a woman of colour since Zienia Burton in Marco Polo. I also like the breadth of scenery – I don’t believe there is another TV Who story set in Australia, or a Who story in any medium set in Hungary. And we have a helicopter and a hovercraft! Barry Letts thinking big! But Troughton steals the show – it’s a real proof of his acting talents, and while the plot may not always make sense, he is always gripping in both roles. This is the first story to end with a cliffhanger since we saw a claw on the Tardis scanner at the end of The Moonbase.

In a season of base-under-siege stories, The Web of Fear marks the peak. Here the base is a mixed military / scientific outpost in Goodge Street tube station, with everyone operating to their own personal agenda; it becomes apparent early on that one of the team is an enemy agent, but we get a lot of misdirection as to who it is (though of course we fans now know, as the viewers of 1968 could not, that Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart is in the clear). A lot of the drama hinges on information flow and trust – the Doctor’s life is endangered in the first episode because Jamie and Victoria lie about his presence; in turn his plan is thwarted in the last episode because he didn’t tell them clearly enough what he was up to. Unlike the other base-under-siege stories, we don’t get much direct speech from the bad guys until the end of the story; also the base commander, in so far as there is one, isn’t as deranged as in most of the other such stories which makes a nice change.

It’s also rather good to have a returning character – I think Travers is the first to reappear since the Meddling Monk; perhaps we should count the Intelligence as well. (It is not at all clear that any of the various individual Daleks and Cybermen reappear from one story to the next; the evidence is rather against it.) It is a shame that we have lost the extended fight sequence in episode 4. Interesting to hear from Derrick Sherwin on the DVD commentary that he always intended The Web of Fear to be the first UNIT story, a concept he then brought to fruition as writer of The Invasion and producer through to Spearhead from Space (more from Sherwin here).

Fury from the Deep is yet another base-under-siege story; this time commander Robson is more manifestly stupid and obstinate than usual (and that is saying something!) and the means and motivation of the monster particularly poorly explained. Jamie and Victoria asking why they always land in England falls rather flat as the Doctor clearly has no answer. Likewise Victoria’s dissatisfaction with the Tardis lifestyle undermines the show’s premise without being really adequately addressed (though this comes right in the last episode, when she gets the best sendoff of any departing companion since the original three). But it is at least well done – great bubbling seaweed, good special effects visible in the surviving clips, decent music and another helicopter!

Pemberton more or less rewrote the story for the Fourth Doctor (Doctor Who and the Pescatons but it wasn’t much better.

Somewhat to my surprise, I have rather warmed to Victoria after watching her seven stories in order. She is actually rather smart, doing stuff in the Tardis lab in Fury from the Deep while Jamie asks the stupid questions; on the whole she gets into trouble because she has bravely ventured out looking for it; and if she has a bit of a tendency to scream in panic, the Second Doctor also tends to yell in alarm and generally get more ruffled than his other incarnations. But she doesn’t really develop much beyond the occasionally screaming arm candy – even Polly, who is less well educated, manages to work out how to tackle Cybermen and uses her feminine wiles for team advantage; so I can see why Deborah Watling left.

Her one return to the screen, in character, is the decidedly odd Downtime, Marc Platt’s sequel to the two Yeti stories (also including Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier) which is none the less recommended. Her first audio Companion Chronicle, The Great Glass Elevator, is rather better than her second, which was released last month. In dead tree format, I recommend The Dark Path by David McIntee, though admittedly more for the Master’s appearance than for Victoria; Terrance Dicks’ early novelisation of The Web of FearDowntime..

The final base-under-siege story of this season is The Wheel In Space. I quite liked this on first watching / listening, but in the overall context of Season Five it feels very predictable: we have the obligatory psychotic base commander refusing to deal with the alien menace and wrongly suspecting the Doctor and Jamie. And we have slightly remodelled Cybermen, doing what Cybermen always do. Apart from the predictable plot, the story does have a few things going for it, though. First is that the dynamic among the crew (commander aside) is the most convincing we have had, with two women in senior roles (though less good marks on race – two non-speaking black parts, and a Chinese character played by a Caucasian actor). Second is the introduction of Zoe, who has been trained to be like a Cyberman but wants to do more with her life – she gets more character development here than in the whole of the rest of her time on the show. The effects of the scenes in space are rather well done. And I suspect that the frst episode, with the Doctor and Jamie playing hide-and-seek with the robot on the Silver Carrier, was good watching, now sadly lost. I note also David Whitaker’s trademark obsession with mercury, though this time with added Bernalium, named after J.D., father of Martin.

And who can fail to appreciate the double entendre of Jamie and Zoe’s first conversation, right up there with the First Doctor’s “reacting vibrator”?

We had five stories in a row set on Earth here, the second longest continuous run of such stories in Old Who (exceeded only by the first six Pertwee stories; possibly tied, depnding how you count, by the combination of the last four Seventh Doctor stories and the TV movie). Also five out of six stories were bases-under-siege; funny how rapidly the show became formulaic. (In fairness the next season is much less so.)

We also had here the joint longest run of destroyed episodes – I had thought previously that the gap from The Tenth Planet #4 to The Underwater Menace #2 was the longest, but in fact the sequence from The Web of Fear #2 to The Wheel in Space #2 is also thirteen episodes. Not a single one of these six stories written up in this entry survives in full. I am very glad that there will be far fewer gaps in my next write-up, and none at all after that.

Somewhere in this run I have passed a significant milestone: I have now watched the first 25% of Old Who (including K9 and Company) in order, whether you count by episodes (697 in total, the 175th being The Abominable Snowmen #1) or stories (160, counting Shada and four stories rather than one in Season 23, so the 40th story is The Web of Fear). I haven’t worked out where the first quartile point is in screen minutes, but it is clearly somewhere in between as the relatively small number of episodes longer than 25 minutes are all concentrated towards the end. Anyhow, it is a nice point to mark. (If you flatten out the time period between 23 November 1963 and 6 December 1989, the first quartile point falls two years later, in late May 1970, because of the intense production schedule of the first six seasons.)

< 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 >

2010 Films 6) One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing

Someone got this for young F at Christmas, one of the 1970s Disney films made in England, set in 1920s London, featuring three nannies versus Chinese spies hunting down a secret message concealed by Lord Southmere on a dinosaur in the Natural History Museum. None of the Chinese speaking parts is actually played by an Asian actor (some of the extras might be); if you can put aside this rather insuperable failure, Peter Ustinov puts on a great show as the lead agent, explicitly linking the shenanigans to anti-colonial struggle; the nannies, played by Helen Hayes and Joan Sims, get rather less satisfactory parts though they and their cohorts do manage rather improbably to defeat twice their number of martial arts students. Derek Nimmo, aged 45, plays Lord Southmere, who is aged 31. The humour is basically slapstick with a dinosaur skeleton running round London and Windsor – Jon Pertwee, recently ex-Doctor Who, turns up as a deranged colonel determined to bag it for his wall, and various other luminaries of British comedy make appearances. The two rich young white boys under Helen Hayes’ care work out what is going on before anyone else does, and give the secret to Peter Ustinov (or rather give it back since Derek Nimmo stole it from the Chinese in the first place). Not a film that could be made by any director with the remotest sensitivity to race and gender issues today.

April Books 3) One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing, by John Harvey from the script by Bill Walsh

I had read the novelisation as a child, and it was interesting to go back to it as an adult, particularly having read the Doctor Who novelisations comparatively recently. It actually manages to be more racist than the film, which is saying something: by making Derek Nimmo’s character, Lord Southmere, the narrator, the Chinese are quite comprehensively othered. There are some odd changes between film and book, perhaps reflecting different stages in the script development: the personal connection between Peter Ustinov’s character, Hnup Wan, and the mother of Marshal Wu Tsai, so crucial to the denoument of the story, is absent; on the other hand the character of Grubb, the police detective played by Roy Kinnear, is given much more development. As novelisations go, it’s not a bad example of converting script to page, and is illustrated with some rather lovely line drawings (but the artist is not credited).

April Books 4) The Great Dinosaur Robbery, by ‘David Forrest’ (Robert Forrest-Webb and David Eliades)

The original book on which the Disney film was based is set in New York, not London, in the contemporary early 1970s, so the Chinese are Maoists rather than followers of a warlord. Also the dinosaur gets dismantled by the nannies overnight rather than driven off on the back of the truck; and, most crucially setting the tone for the book, in the opening scene the Earl of Hastings is killed by his own cyanide capsule when his ex-nanny belts him across the face, rather than being held captive for most of the story like Lord Southmere in the film. The book concentrates much more on the work of the police investigators of the dinosaur theft, a special team of stereotypes brought together to fight international organised crime. One of the nannies is shagging her employer, while another is allergic to men; this is supposed to be funny, as are the freqent citations of Mao by the Chinese and their eventual fate (sent to Taiwan, where they will probably be executed). One or two jokes from the book made it into the film, but really this is for grownups who aren’t looking for anything very worthwhile.

Thanks to Abigail Nussbaum for supplying links for those nominees available online; I’ve combined that with the latest prices from The Book Depository to generate this list. (And yes, those are euro prices, because this list is largely for my convenience: currently €1 = US$1.35, so add about a third; €1 = £0.89, so take off ten per cent; other currencies here.)

Best Novel

• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest: €12.09
• The City & The City, China Miéville: €7.49
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson: €17.34 hardback, but €7.59 paperback coming next month
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente: €9.17
• Wake, Robert J. Sawyer: just say no €6.75 paperback to be published on Thursday
• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi – €16.98 hardback, but €9.28 paperback to be published next month.

Best Novella

• "Act One", Nancy Kress – here
• The God Engines, John Scalzi – €13.61
• “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross in Wireless – €9.84 – and here
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow – €10.14
• “Vishnu at the Cat Circus”, Ian McDonald in Cyberabad Days – €7.65
• The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker – not available at The Book Depository; RRP €25.94

Best Novelette

• “Eros, Philia, Agape”, Rachel Swirsky – here
• The Island”, Peter Watts – hereThe New Space Opera 2, hardback €11.44, paperback for €5.93 out next month
• “It Takes Two”, Nicola Griffith – in Eclipse Three, €10.46 and here.
• “One of Our Bastards is Missing”, Paul Cornell – here and in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, €5.43
• “Overtime”, Charles Stross – here
• “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast”, Eugie Foster – here

Best Short Story

• “The Bride of Frankenstein”, Mike Resnick – just say no not yet available online
• “Bridesicle”, Will McIntosh – here
• “The Moment”, Lawrence M. Schoen – here and in Footprints, €10.09
• “Non-Zero Probabilities”, N.K. Jemisin – here
• “Spar”, Kij Johnson – here

Best Related Book

• Canary Fever: Reviews, John Clute – not available at The Book Depository; RRP€39.43
• Hope-In-The-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees, Michael Swanwick – not available at The Book Depository
• The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction, Farah Mendlesohn – €38.01
• On Joanna Russ, Farah Mendlesohn (ed.) – €20.38
• The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms, Helen Merrick – €12.98
• This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”), Jack Vance – not available at The Book Depository; RRP €29.64

Best Graphic Story

• Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? written by Neil Gaiman; art by Andy Kubert and Scott Williams – €14.73
• Captain Britain And MI13. Volume 3: Vampire State written by Paul Cornell; art by Leonard Kirk, Mike Collins, Adrian Alphona and Ardian Syaf – €11.15
• Fables Vol 12: The Dark Ages written by Bill Willingham; art by Mark Buckingham, Peter Gross, Andrew Pepoy, Michael Allred, David Hahn, Lee Loughridge, Laura Allred and by Todd Klein – €11.51
• Girl Genius, Volume 9: Agatha Heterodyne and the Heirs of the Storm written by Kaja and Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio and Cheyenne Wright – start reading here
• Schlock Mercenary: The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse written and illustrated by Howard Tayler – start reading here

Eleven of the seventeen short fiction nominees are already available for free online, but note how inexpensive the anthologies are; and how expensive and in several cases difficult to obtain the non-fiction books are. (I have whined about Beccon’s customer-unfriendly policies before.)

• Behind the Sofa – The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog: The Girl in the Spotty Nightgown and Red Cardigan
  The best Who blog assesses the latest incarnation
  (tags: doctorwho)
• drasecretcampus: Banoffee Pie
  Serves 2 to 12.
  (tags: cooking)

I love Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga, but this is not one of my favourite volumes, and I was slightly surprised to discover that it had won the Hugo. Structurally it is rather obviously bolted together from the original novella, “The Weatherman”, and the subsequent expansion to novel length with the whole space war story; and the whole plot crucially depends on the massive coincidence of Miles bumping into Gregor on page 145. Having said that, the competition that year was not especially intense (see below) and I wonder if there might not have been an element of rewarding Bujold not just for The Vor Game but for her work to date, and particularly for the Dendarii stories.

It is still a decent enough book. Bujold’s portrayal of a rule-bound society which is trying to adapt to the outside world, and which is run by actual human beings who occasionally just want to run away from it all, is what really makes the series (and gives The Vor Game its title) – my favourite character in this book is Gregor, worried that he may not be up to the job but proving himself both sexually and politically. Miles could have been one of these intensely annoying MilSF heroes who never lose a battle or an argument; but we do see him make mistakes and paying for the consequences. The complex military and diplomatic situation of the Hegen Hub is conveyed to us sufficiently clearly that we appreciate the potential impact of the decisions made by just one or two outsiders. So it’s a fun read, but I think she didn’t really hit her stride until Memory, Komarr and A Civil Campaign.

Other Hugo nominees that year: Earth by David Brin, The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, Queen of Angels by Greg Bear and The Quiet Pools by Michael Kube-McDowell. The only other one I have read is the Simmons, which was a disappointment after Hyperion

I think Doctor Who is in good hands. This is one of the stronger debut stories for a new Doctor – up there with Rose and An Unearthly Child. We enjoyed every minute of the hour.

Matt Smith does it with humour and total conviction, and Karen Gillan shows promise too (though hopefully will get a bit more to do in future episodes). You can understand that each of them clicked with Moffat and Wenger as rapidly as we are told they did. Amy’s character starts with reason to be annoyed as well as fascinated by the Doctor, but is herself keeping some secrets from him and presumably from us too.

The actual plot did have a lot of elements from Moffat’s previous Who stories – but these were good stories first time round, and we went in a slightly new direction here: for instance, the Doctor’s visitation of Madame de Pompadour was him dipping into her story, whereas his visit to Amy got her into therapy (which, and this may have been a subtle point, may not be such a bad thing for a child who has lost her parents). Though I hope Moffat’s future stories are a bit more experimental.

Lots of little pleasing points. The montage of the previous Doctors – a great way of establishing 46 years of continuity for new viewers. The Tardis swimming pool (for the first time in New Who, it’s more than just the control room) and new interior (which is nicely syncretic, though children will need to be told what a typewriter is). The final shot of Amy’s fannish drawings of the Doctor and the Tardis, and her wedding dress.

I’m not blown away by the new version of the theme music, but I will get used to it.

I’m away for the next two weeks but should be able to catch the next two episodes somehow…

Young F was at a friend’s birthday party this afternoon, and on our way back I spotted a rare sight – a hitch-hiker trying to get onto the E40 at the Steenokkerzeel junction. He asked if I could take him to Germany; I offered the next service station which at least is probably an improvement over a semi-rural slip road. He turned out to be hitching home to Lithuania – had started this morning in Dover, got a ferry and by five o’clock was now just east of Brussels, which I bet is a real black hole for hitch-hikers. He should probably make it to Germany this evening – indeed, might even be there by now – and reckoned he would be home in another two days.

It struck me how rare it is to see hitch-hikers these days. Certainly when I was doing it regularly myself, between twenty and twenty-five years ago, there seemed to be a lot of competition; now I guess a combination of increased concerns about crime (from both hitcher and driver) and a general shrivelling of generosity in society has cut down drastically on the numbers. Nice to occasionally do my bit against the trend.

Idly checking the state of debate among Eurosceptics, I was wryly amused to discover that the latest bogeyman is the European Gendarmerie Force, or EGF. Described on one blog as intended to squash public disobedience, on another more glamorously as the "Armed Enforcers of the Fascist European Superstate, it is apparently about to be deployed to crush rioters in Greece; this paramilitary force is so secret that it has its own website. (The source of much of this is an article by Udo Ulfkotte, here in the original Germandeath penalty has not in fact been introduced as a result of the Lisbon Treaty. (I think you can guess the answer.) In fairness, the more mainstream swivel-eyed loons haven’t touched this one, apart from Ashley Mote MEP noting that the EGF website talks of the EU constitution, thus a "clear admission" of what the Lisbon Treaty really is (because obviously it is more likely that the governments of 27 countries would collectively lie to their people than that a poorly-written website might be inaccurate).

It is paranoid fantasy of course. The EGF, whose total staff numbers 30 rather than 3000, isn’t even an EU body; it is a pooling of expertise on what one might call robust policing methods by France, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Romania, with input also from Poland and Turkey. It is not deployable within the EU – this is not made terribly clear on the site (and is a point missed even by some people who should know better) but it is explicit in reference to the Santa Maria de Feira and Nice European Council conclusions, and to the Petersberg declaration, all of which is EU-speak for deployment to external crises in support of (or substitution for) the UN or similar bodies.

My own first encounter with it was back in 2005 (see recommendation #2 of this report, which was not in fact adopted by the powers that be). Looking at the website now, what strikes me is how little the EGF appears to have actually done in its five years of existence. Members of its secretariat get deployed hither and yon (this year so far to Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Haiti) and as a body it has taken responsibility for training Afghan police in Mazar-i-Sharif and coordinating the police aspects of the EU military mission in Bosnia. But in order to be the effective bogeyman of Europhobe myth, it needs to raise its game considerably!

I’ve been trying to find a way of watching last night’s BBC interview with Peter Robinson, in the course of which he apparently told the interviewer that she was “dense” and “silly”, but unfortunately not being based in the UK I can’t used the BBC iPlayer to see it. I understand that it is pretty uncomfortable to watch, but I have a grim train-wreck urge to get hold of it anyway.

I can’t imagine that the interview, or the BBC story to which Robinson was reacting, will change many people’s minds. Robinson’s personal style is pretty well known; he has been MP for East Belfast for over thirty years now. I would be rather astonished if there are a lot of potential DUP voters out there who watch it and are shocked into changing their vote because he gives a journalist a hard time. Of course, I haven’t seen the interview and might change my mind if I do.

On the actual facts of the case, Robinson agrees that he bought a potentially valuable piece of land for £5, but it is also clear that he sold it for £5. The BBC case that he (or his developer friend) evaded tax in this particular instance is not very strong, even by the BBC’s own account. Anyone with half an ear open is aware of the close links between property developers and electoral politics in certain areas of Northern Ireland, and there would need to be a more visibly smoking gun to make a real difference to Robinson’s reputation (or the DUP’s).

One piece I have been able to watch is the Guardian’s video blog about North Down, where Lady Hermon is presented as a true Labour supporter who could hold the balance of power on her own in the next parliament. It’s a rather smug Guardian piece; I winced at Harris’s errors (“Republican” instead of “Nationalist”, mispronouncing “Bangor”, misspelling Ian Parsley’s name) and a lot of it is him burbling to the camera or to the locals rather than actually getting their views. Ian Parsley has denied (scroll down to comment #4) the jibe that he didn’t know what “legal highs” are, which is actually the most serious blow against him in the piece (other than his own account of himself).

Readers (if any are left) will have observed that I’m unduly fascinated by North Down, where the UUP, who won the seat in the Westminster elections in 2005, are not standing but backing the Conservative candidate, and the DUP, who got most votes in the Assembly election in 2007, are also not standing but backing the incumbent MP. This means that the parties which collectively got over 85% of the votes in 2005 will be absent from the fray this time. I know I’m unhealthily obsessed, but I still think this is unusual.

I might start tracking the various places near the office I eat lunch at. Tried a new one today – the Gallery Garden, a little bit further along rue Stevin than I usually go. Very edible tagliatelle with salmon for €12, not very crowded (though a lot of people are away at present), swift and courteous service (waiter spotted I was Anglophone as soon as I opened my mouth and addressed me in excellent English thereafter. Once I’d finished eating I was in a mood to appreciate the blue nudes of Sylvie Bresse decorating the walls. I’ll be back.

…I am “world-renowned“.

(A legend in my own lunchtime?)

Well, this clarifies matters. Makes Lady Hermon’s retention of the seat seem rather less tricky. NB that the DUP have only contested this seat twice for Westminster elections (in 1992 and 2005).

• : Open Europe: the Eurosceptic group that controls British coverage of the EU
  Interesting piece which goes some way to explaining the fantasy coverage of the EU in the British press
  (tags: eu)

Doctor Who: The Final Sanction by Steve Lyons
British Science Fiction & Fantasy: Twenty Years, Two Surveys by Paul Kincaid and Niall Harrison
Lays of Beleriand: The History of Middle-Earth 3 by Christopher Tolkien
Book of Lost Tales: Pt. 2: The History of Middle-earth 2 by J.R.R. Tolkien
Doctor Who: The Murder Game by Steve Lyons
The Universe Between by Alan E Nourse
Leviathan or The Whale by Philip Hoare (borrowed)
The Not-So-Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen by Mitali Perkins
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield
Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett
Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchett
Questioning the Millennium. by Stephen Jay Gould
Doctor Who Annual 1969
Cauldron by Jack McDevitt
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Non-Fiction 6 (YTD 18)

Fiction (non-sf) 6 (YTD 15)

SF (non-Who) 5 (YTD 23)

Doctor Who etc fiction 8 (YTD 17)

5/25 (YTD 16/73) by women (Jones, Collins, Mehran, Montgomery, Picoult)
2/25 (YTD 7/73) by PoC (Mehran, Obama)
12/25 owned for more than a year (Hyperion [reread], Moby-Dick [reread], Mr. Bloomfield’s Orchard, Forbidden Acts, A Different Kingdom [reread], Radical Islam’s Rules, War of the Daleks, Cat’s Cradle: Witch Mark, Black and Blue, Wandering Star, My Sister’s Keeper, Profiles of the Future)
3/25 reread, total YTD rereads 6/73
Page count ~8,000 (YTD ~22,400) including a notional 100 for Dead Air and 200 for The Last Voyage.

I saw a very favourable review of this Tenth Doctor audio book in DWM, but started off feeling a bit disappointed, particularly after my enjoyment of Dead Air

The plot thickens in North Down, where one of the UUP’s two assembly members has resigned in support of Lady Sylvia Hermon, the local MP.

The UUP’s strategic linkage with the Conservatives has thus so far seen the nomination in the only seat they won last time given to the Tories, the loss of their only MP and of another elected representative; meanwhile the most winnable of the other 17 seats, South Antrim, is also the only seat where no candidate has yet been agreed between the two partners. Perhaps voters will see this as a winning strategy; I am not myself a voter, but I am not hugely convinced.

I see that Neal Barrett, jr, has just been named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

I don’t believe I have read anything by him. Any recommendations as to where (or if) I should start?

I’ve enjoyed listening to this 1977 sf radio story, in six 25-minute episodes, starring no less than Peter Cushing and Vincent Price (the latter with a mild American accent, but you can be sure it is him) delivering a script by one Rene Basilico based on a story idea by the great Robert Holmes. We start, à la Wicker Man, on a remote Scottish island where Funny Things Are Happening. Our heroes, who have turned up to discover more about the death of an old friend, conclude that the island is a nest of telepathic mutants. They pursue their investigations further in London, where they discover tendrils of the conspiracy percolating to the top of the Establishment (apologies for mixed metaphor). Hints are dropped that Sir Alec Douglas-Hume may have been one of those involved. Richard Hurndall, the stand-in for William Hartnell in The Five Doctors, makes an appearance as a respectable Scottish banker in the last episode.

It is not a flawless piece of drama: as with many six-part Doctor Who stories, there is not quite enough story to pad out the episodes, and also most of the time the mutants don’t seem to be very threatening to the rest of humanity. But of course this is a story of the Cold War era, we could see the mutants as concealed Communists (or the conspiracy theory target group of your choice – Catholics? Jews? Homosexuals? Scots???) and Cushing and Price do a good double act of trying to get to the heart of the matter; and anyway their voices are simply very pleasurable to listen to. An interesting curio which leavened my diet of Doctor Who audios.

I’m a fan of Stephen Cole’s more recent books, but this is experimental stuff which shows a talent still coming together. The story brings Ben, Polly and the First Doctor to an asteroid where a bunch of human soldiers are mounting a special operation against the alien Schirr; things go wrong it it becomes clear that they have collectively fallen into a trap laid by the aliens and their collaborators. The chapters (mostly) take their titles from Agatha Christie novels, which is a bit misleading – the real reference in the title is to James Cameron’s Aliens, where there are clear resonances.

The core plot is competently done, but there are a number of things that don’t work. First, Cole makes Ben a racist, and then this vanishes the moment Polly reproves him for it. This is too big an issue to be dealt with so casually. Second, there is a long section where the narrative is divided up between characters, choose-your-own-adventure style. I simply didn’t have the energy to play that game and just skipped to the next section. Finally, it may have just been my low energy levels, but I found ten supporting character too many to keep track of.

Having said that, Cole does a decent characterisation of the fading First Doctor and a very good Polly. But I wouldn’t recommend this to non-fans.

Thanks, all for your good wishes re my teeth. I saw the nice stomalogist / maxillary surgeon this afternoon at the curiously named Hôpital Deux Alices in Uccle, and she anaesthetised my jaw thoroughly and whipped out the errant fragments. “No hot food or hot drink this evening,” she warned me, but by the time I could feel my mouth enough to be sure of not biting my tongue, I could also feel it well enough that I did not want to eat anything much. Still, I’m glad that it is over, and relieved that I did not have to wait very long to get it done.

How was your day? Mine started by bursting a front tyre as I grazed the kerb outside F’s school while dropping him off. Not too far to drive to the nearest tyre specialist, but it meant an hour of sitting around waiting for it to be fixed, when I had had a number of other things planned.

Luckily as I sat around contemplating the meaning of Michelin and Goodyear, I had with me David Tennant’s recorded voice, reading James Goss’s excellent Doctor Who novel, Dead Air, which took me from that Belgian industrial suburb to a pirate radio ship off the southern coast of England in 1966, where the Doctor is dealing with a mysterious entity called the Hush, which exists as an organism based on sound alone; it absorbs its victims and turns them into sound patterns – if they are lucky. It is tremendously creepy and enjoyable, and Dark Hints are dropped which one can interpret as tying into the Tenth Doctor’s final story; also Tennant is an excellent reader – the whole thing is done in character as a first-person narrative from the Doctor’s point of view, but he conveys the other characters very convincingly too. This is very strongly recommended.