I have been musing about the rate at which one’s descendants will increase. This ties in with my fascination with the concept of the most recent common ancestor of humanity, and my suspicion that I (and most of you) are ultimately descended from both Charlemagne and the Prophet Muhammad. I was interested to read somewhere that the famous Bunker twins, who married in 1843, now have 1500 or maybe even 2000 descendants mostly in the area of North Carolina where they retired. (That’s an average annual increase, flattened ruthlessly over the 166 years since their first two children were born in 1844, of just over 4% in their number of living descendants.)

I then thought of comparing this with a much better documented genealogy of about the same vintage – the descendants of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. There are apparently 836 of them living at present, which is actually not a bad match for the Bunkers since it covers almost exactly the same time period (their first child was born in 1840). The rate of increase over the intervening period is basically exponential as you would expect:

Converting it to a logarithmic scale gives a better sense of the texture:

After the initial surge as Victorian and Albert produced their 9 children, the average annual increase since the mid-1880s is 2.6% (one can detect perhaps several phases here – a 4% annual rate from 1885 to 1915, then a drop below 2% to 1956, then a sudden surge back up to 3.5% to 1969, and from then on a fairly steady 1.9%). At the 2.6% rate, Victoria and Albert’s living descendants will number 1000 by the year 2015, and will reach a million by the year 2300 and a billion by the year 2600. At the recent lower 1.9% rate, it takes longer (1000 by 2018, a million by 2400, a billion by 2800).

I have to admit that Victoria and Albert, on the one hand, and the Bunker brothers, on the other, were pretty philoprogenitive. Shakespeare’s direct descendants died out with his granddaughter. More locally, my brother, my sister and I (and our children) are the only living descendants of our American pair of great-grandparents. (Our Irish sets of great-grandparents did rather better.) But I think you quite rapidly reach the point where individual family fortunes get smeared into the overall bigger picture, and once you have over, say, 40 descendants the edge effects become less important.

Of course, this is so far all about descendants through all possible lines. (Also the figures include adopted children, apparently 14 out of the 1000 cases here.) Research into Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA addresses the male and female lines of descent exclusively, so I wondered what these look like for the descendants of Victoria and Albert. This graph shows those living at the end of each year:

As you would expect (because mothers tend to be younger than fathers) the female line is some way above the male line. But the edge effects, ie the fortunes of individual family units, are much more noticeable here. Note in particular that the female-line descendants are consistently around twice as numerous as the male-line descendants, until 1918, when 18% of them (Alexandra and her four daughters) get removed from the equation by firing squad. They are still more numerous than the males, but only by 40-50% these days.

This graph shows the living female-line and male-line descendants as a percentage of all living descendants of Victoria and Albert since 1900. The overall trend for both is down but not out (I reckon both sets of descendants have now reached critical mass). By the time Victoria and Albert have a million descendants, I reckon that only a few hundred will be directly in the male or female lines. This puts the genetic achievements of, say, Genghis Khan (pdf) and Niall of the Nine Hostages into perspective; if 8% of men from China to Uzbekistan are descended from Genghis in the male line, and a similar percentage of Irish men are descended in the male line from Niall, then the entire local population (and much of that of neighbouring or dispora countries) must also be descended from the ancient progenitors one way or the other.

Incidentally, the direct male and female lines from Victoria and Albert do not include the current top rank of British royals. Queen Elizabeth’s father, George VI, was a direct male descendant of Victoria and Albert (via George V and Edward VII), but of course had only two daughters so Albert’s Y-chromosomes ended with him. Likewise Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was a direct female-line descendant via her mother Princess Victoria of Hesse and her grandmother Princess Alice (so were also Prince Philip’s four sisters, now all dead, and their daughters and female-line descendants). One of the more interesting male-line descendants by one of Victoria’s younger sons is the Swiss musician Adrian Coburg, an expert in Afro-Cuban percussion.

Going back to where I started, a couple who lived in the ninth century, and whose descendants consistently increased by 2% per annum since then without other constraints, would now have descendants equal in number to the population of the whole world today. If the growth rate is 1.5%, you have to kick the most recent common ancestor at constant growth rates back to the fifth century. Of course geographical and cultural constraints will slow the process down; but I think Rohde showed convincingly that it makes surprisingly little difference to the basic conclusion, which is that we are probably all descended from someone who lived in south-eastern China, who had a lot of children, and who died less than two thousand years ago.

I’ve had a really bad cold for most of the last week: came home early Tuesday, spent most of Wednesday and Thursday in bed, struggled into work Friday morning but thought better of it and came home. The weekend has been largely horizontal though we made it to dinner with friends last night. I should be up and about tomorrow but am still taking it easy today. (This explains why I have been reading so many books in the last few days.)

It was exacerbated by a really painful mouth ulcer – one of the worst I can remember having. I eventually went to the doctor about it, and she told me that the one treatment which has consistently worked for me in the past – a corticosteroid cream – has been taken off the market. I couldn’t quite believe this, and am still boggling slightly at the decisions of the pharmaceutical industry. The doctor prescribed me a version of the magic mouthwash used by chemotherapy patients, including not only a corticosteroid solution but also a judicious amount of lidocaine, which the chemist had to make up for me by hand; and I’m glad to say that cured it in 24 hours. But I’m still worried by the absence of a handy treatment which I might need, say, when travelling; I hope that something similar to the old cream comes back on the market soon.

An adventure with the Tenth Doctor and Martha, set around Halloween in a small town in contemporary New England where there have been spooky goings-on (which turn out to be sort-of linked to The Shakespeare Code). I found it nicely atmospheric; Morris uses the local children as viewpoint characters which works rather well. No doubt those who know New England better than me will pick at the details but I enjoyed it.

Latest in my run of reading Hugo-winning novels that I haven’t written up elsewhere. Here, a group of seven pilgrims – priest, soldier, poet, scholar, captain, investigator, diplomat – are called to undertake an interstellar pilgrimage to the shrine of a mysterious violent deity known as the Shrike. Six of them tell their stories in the framing narrative of their journey, which ends in media res as they approach their destination. It is a format which has been used by others (notably Chaucer, who is referenced on several occasions), but Simmons does it very well: each of his pilgrims has a distinctive voice, even as they are also archetypes, and he has successfully imported into sf a lot of tropes more often associated with horror (particularly the nature of the Shrike). It is an intense read, and I found the 500 pages fairly flew by.

There is one passage that particularly affects me: “The Scholar’s Tale”, which is actually more a parent’s tale, where one of Simmons’ protagonists has to deal with the physical and psychological regression of his daughter from the age of 27 to babyhood. This is uncomfortably close to my own family situation.

The other novels shortlisted for the Hugo in 1990 were Poul Anderson’s The Boat of a Million  Years, George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun, Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass and Orson Scott Card’s Prentice Alvin. I have read the last two of these, and Hyperion is better than either (though I enjoyed both books). I thought I had read the Anderson as well but the synopses I find online don’t ring any bells.

• Reading Gibbon’s "Decline and Fall" – Chapter XIX: Constantius, Gallus and Julian
  Another excellent narrative chapter. Constantius II, having become sole emperor, is faced with the problem of how to handle his cousins Gallus and Julian, who have been brought up essentially in prison to prevent them being a threat. Eventually Gallus is old enough to be made Caesar of the East; he screws up massively and is executed. Julian, six years younger, is in due course made Caesar of the West, and does much better both in terms of fighting off the Germans and in terms of domestic governance. In the meantime the Persians have woken up under Sapor and attempt to conquer Mesopotamia but make only modest gains. A wide geographic spread with action in today’s Iraq, Hungary and Belgium (and surrounding territories) which would make a good mini-series on its own.
  (tags: gibbon)

This is the first Doctor Who anthology without any mention of the Doctor: ten stories exploring the family history of Roz Forrester, a companion from the Seventh Doctor spinoff books (I have read only one which features her). The concept is of telling the story of ten Forrester ancestors, direct or collateral, over a thousand year period starting in the twentieth century; I was a bit surprised that the framing historical narrative, having gone in the standard space opera planet-colonisation direction for most of the book, then contracts back down to a declining and dying Earth (and the Forresters’ Xhosa background) for the last two stories, and didn’t quite understand why. But none of the stories is bad; I particularly enjoyed Ben Jeapes’ “Heritage”, which put an original twist on the generation starship theme.

Classic book of essays by Clarke, originally written in 1962 mostly for Playboy, and updated by him in 1999 – so the first edition was written when he was a little older than I am now, and the revision when he was 82; will I be reviewing old blog posts for republication in 2049? It is all good solid stuff about the future of technology and space flight, and the nature of the universe. One notable miss is that he doesn’t seem to have been very worried about environmental concerns, at that stage anyway. One remarkable hit is the chapter “Voices from the Sky”, where he looks at the coming revolution in worldwide communication and predicts global media, GPS, fax machines, teleconferencing and ebooks (and admits in an afterword that the biggest mistake of the essay is not realising how quickly it would happen). Anyway, it’s yet another reminder of how Clarke shaped our world.

This is another 96-page annual, slightly different in format from previous ones – lots of very short stories (ten altogether, plus another two comic strips) and also lots of info pages mostly about astronomy and space travel. The artist(s) totally fail to draw either Jamie or Victoria at all well (in the first strip – which is pretty awful – the female companion is identified as ‘Polly’ but is dark-haired). The stories start off rather poor but get better towards the middle – though rather oddly, both the second strip, “Atoms Infinite”, and the next but one story, “The Microtron Men” have the same plot. Also the Doctor is consistently identified as coming from Earth, just at the point when the TV series was starting to stress his non-human origins more. And irritating usage of “Dr. Who” addressing the companions directly as “children”, which I don’t think we ever got from the Second Doctor on screen. Apparently this is the easiest of the older annuals to find, but only completists need bother.

I really wanted to love this novel about three Iranian sisters setting up a Persian cafe in a town in County Mayo in 1986, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to. The bits about Iran during the revolution, and indeed about cookery, are heartfelt and well-written; the Irish scene-setting, which makes up the bulk of the book, is much less convincing (a town whose high street is called “Main Mall”???) and descends into Oirishry at various points. Ireland in 1986 was about to enter a truly convulsive period of its history, but there is almost no trace of that here. The unsubtle characterisation is another problem – we know that the pub owner is a bully, because he is described with that word at almost every appearance. Half a dozen recipes are provided, but all in American measurements and nomenclature (“eggplants”, “ground lamb”) despite this being the British / European edition. Sorry to be grumpy but I was rather disappointed with this book.

I very much enjoyed Peel’s novelisations of black-and-white era Dalek stories, where he managed to inject a bit more sense and continuity than was to be found in the originals; here he writes a fun Eighth Doctor story which is very much in the tradition of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors’ televised encounters with the spawn of Skaro, including lots of thrilling elements such as Thal commandos, Davros on trial and yet leading a faction in a Dalek civil war, and the twisted and complex plans of the anti-Davros leader (here dubbed the Dalek Prime). There is even a pleasing nod to The Power of the Daleks towards the end. Sam is now going all gooey-eyed at the Doctor, a foreshadowing of things to come (and I wonder how they will keep that up in future books).

I have already read the next Eighth Doctor book (Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles) so will skip on to Kursaal by Peter Anghelides.

Collection of horror stories with peculiar erotic overtones (or of peculiar erotic stories with horror overtones). Not really my thing. One worth mentioning is an update of Dorian Gray, “The Picture of Jonathan Collins”, by Karl Edward Wagner. SFX magazine, please note that 6 out of 24 authors and one of the two co-editors were women.

The Seventh Doctor and Ace find themselves in Wales dealing with peculiar mythological creatures leaking through from a parallel world, an adventure that self-consciously references both Delta and the Bannermen and Survival. This is one of the least impressive Doctor Who books I have ever read, and certainly the worst New Adventure that I have got to so far. No matter what you may think of Torchwood, it did this plot and setting rather better, several times. I see various fan sites excoriating the limp writing, flabby characterisation and unresolved plot lines of this book; I shall add a complaint about Welsh and Irish names being randomly jumbled together with unicorns and centaurs, because it’s all mythical, y’know. Thanks to for supplying my copy, but it is now destined for the mooch list.

(And I still do not see much linkage between the three Cat’s Cradle books.)

Ow. The Underwater Menace is the first really bad story for some time, in fact almost as bad as The Sensorites which is my least favourite story so far. The plot is dreadfully padded – the Tardis crew faffing around getting captured in the first episode, wandering around in caves in the second episode, the hideously embarrassing fish-people dance in the surviving third episode, more cave wanderings in the last episode. The plot is fundamentally stupid, and Joseph Furst intensely annoying as Professor Zaroff. (Likewise Peter Stephens, doing a reprise of Cyril the schoolboy as Lolem the high priest; and the risible parts written for Token Irish Guy and Token Black Guy.)

As minor compensation, it looks decent enough, and the early Dudley Simpson score generally works; and some of the supporting cast are good – Ara (played by 16-year-old Catherine Howe who went on to a successful career in music) is clearly deeply in love with Polly, in the most overt gay crush in Who since Ian and Marco Polo. And Troughton carries it well, conveying at least his own confidence in the story (however feigned that may have been). Episode Three is the thirteenth Second Doctor episode, but the earliest to survive. I can't help feeling that any one of the previous twelve would have been better.

Well, it's The Moonbase and the Cybermen are back. Only four stories on from The Tenth Planet, but we have essentially the same plot, with no women at all bar Polly (who saves the day by thinking of nail varnish remover) and only one non-white character who gets killed off in his first scene. We also lose the Cybermen's own motivation, which was incoherent but at least sincere in The Tenth Planetnot pretend to be someone else; identity settling down at last?)

The one thing I will say in favour is that the Radiophonic workshop music is very good – when I heard the lunar surface theme, I checked to see if the BBC had ripped off the Ligeti Kyrie from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and they hadn't; the film came out a year after this story was shown). The dénouement of the Cybermen being levitated off the Moon is also better than I had remembered, and the whole realisation of the lunar surface is rather effective. But it's rather a poor relation of The Tenth Planet.

On the other hand I have seriously upgraded my opinion of The Macra Terror as a result of watching the recon, one of the rare cases where the BBC audio book version is rather poor (due to John Nathan-Turner writing the linking narrative). The holiday camp atmosphere is delightfully bonkers, especially when it turns out that all the colonists are in fact the unwitting slaves of, as the Pilot puts is, "grotesque insects" who thrive on pollution and corrupt the minds of their victims. The soundscape – incidental music and various sound effects – is remarkably good even by the generally high standards of this period of the programme's history, which is just as well considering the visuals are lost. Even Michael Craze actually gets something interesting to do when Ben gets brainwashed (which interesting means his accent slips into standard RP). The scenes of the Doctor and Polly working out what to do with the pipes in the last episode are an early version of numerous Third Doctor / Jo Grant exchanges to come. And while I feel sorry for the Australian viewers who missed out on the many shots of Polly screaming deleted by the censors, fortunately the result is that we can now watch Anneke Wills at full lung power. (Though I have a suspicion that the loss of the Macra in their first incarnation may not be such a shame.)

It's also Jamie's first proper story as a companion (though this comes about because of the narrative space opened up by Ben's being brainwashed). The Macra Terror has leapt up in my estimation; it is my favourite Second Doctor story so far. Only five episodes survive from Troughton's first season; I would swap any of them for one of these four. (And think how rapidly the programme has changed – The Savages, by the same writer as The Macra Terror, was broadcast barely a year before, with Hartnell's Doctor, Steven and Dodo; now we have Troughton's Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie. A huge shift.)

And suddenly we are back in contemporary Britain, in Gatwick airport no less. I found I liked more aspects of The Faceless Ones than I had expected. The location is itself a bit of a star – the two surviving episodes of The Faceless Ones really show up just how badly Time Flight muffed similar opportunities with Heathrow, many years later. Pauline Collins is brilliant as Sam Briggs, and it is a real shame that she didn't stay on as the new companion. Troughton and Hines are good as well, the Doctor gradually taking control of the situation, Jamie overcoming his initial confusion.

Of the supporting cast, Colin Gordon, who was Number Two twice in The Prisoner, is less sinister but still very watchable as the Commandant, and a number of other semi-familiar faces turn up – including Wanda Ventham as Colin Gordon's secretary, and Commander Andred of the Castellan Guard is in charge of the immigration desk. The special effects of the Chameleons turning into people and of the plane docking with the spaceship appear to have been decently realised, as far as we can tell.

But it's still a miss rather than a hit. After much buildup, the central plot premise, once it is revealed, makes no sense at all, and the details make it even more incoherent; hardly a single element of the alien plan makes sense. (Why miniaturise? How did they set up a tour company?) A lesser point, but Bernard Kay's inspector has a very peculiar range of accents (like Jamie, when he is duplicated by the Chameleons, he starts speaking RP which I suppose the director thought of as 'losing' his accent). Finally, despite their limitations, and although their final scene when they briefly reappear in the last episode is rather nice, Ben and Polly deserved a better sendoff.

So goodbye to Ben; let's hope he got his ship. Of the early male companions, I think he is actually the least successful; he gets basically two interesting moments – the Z-Bomb subplot in The Tenth Planet, and his own brainwashing in The Macra Terror – and apart from that he is the physical force guy in the Tardis, straight man to Hartnell's Doctor for three stories and then auxiliary muscle to Troughton's Doctor for another six (rather like the "tin dog" role that Mickey complains about in School Reunion).

Ben as a character is curiously short-changed in The Power of the Daleks when we as the audience are clearly directed not to sympathise with his suspicion of the new Doctor – compare RTD's much better treatment of the Rose/Doctor dynamic in The Christmas Invasion. Craze is decent enough as an actor but never really dominates the screen as his co-stars do. I hate to say it, but when he disappears in the second episode of The Faceless Ones we hardly notice. Craze is unfortunately no longer available for convention appearances or spinoff audios.

Anneke Wills as Polly is a very different matter. We know more about her background than any other companion since Ian and Barbara (bar the short-lived Sara Kingdom) – we've seen her office, we've seen her favourite night club, we've seen her hairstyle vary interestingly over the last few stories. Wills was clearly given the job of bringing some glamour as well as girliness to the companion role, and she discharges it well – a powerful set of lungs for screaming, but also coming through with useful suggestions and an element of compassion when it is necessary. However, in the end she is back where she and Ben started.

Wills has done several plays for Big Finish, usually as the mother of audio companion Charlotte Pollard, though she has reprised Polly both in a Companion Chronicle and in the recently concluded Three Companions series of short episodes with Nicholas Courtney's Brigadier. My favourite book with Ben and Polly is John Peel's novelisation of The Power of the Daleks.

Well, I have revised my opinion of Evil of the Daleks upwards thanks to watching the reconstruction. I still rate it below Troughton's debut story, The Power of the Daleks, because the plot has some large holes (why go to the bother of the elaborate entrapment via the cafe in 1966? how is the Doctor supposed to spread the Dalek Factor through history? what's up with Terrall anyway?) and also I just don't like Victoria (though again, maybe I will change my mind after doing her stories in sequence).

There are a couple of things about Evil of the Daleks, however, that really appealed to me this time. First, Marius Goring as the deranged Maxtible is a compelling vilain, especially as backed up by John Bailey as Waterfield – together they are the two sides of the scientist character portrayed by Lesterson in the previous story. Second, Dudley Simpson is on top of things as composer – the Daleks have a "diggerdy-dum" leitmotif, Victoria has a more wistful theme. Third, while I'm not a huge fan of turning the Daleks into something else by giving them humanity, Whitaker handles it better here than Helen Raynor did in Daleks of Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks. Fourth, it's a nice early example (or perhaps foreshadowing) of the steampunk subgenre.

Finally, the two episodes on Skaro are an excellent climax to not just this story but the five Dalek stories of the black-and-white era; the return to their home planet somehow gives the Daleks more cultural depth than they previously had, with the thrilling appearance of the Emperor and the excitement of the civil war. So more of a thumbs up than I expected.

Good to finish this run on a high note. Tomb of the Cybermen is one of the great Who stories. It is the best Cyberman story in the whole of Who, combining the Cybermen themselves doing something more interesting than the standard invasion lark with a very watchable cast of Good and Bad humans. Victoria, as I have said, is not my favourite comopanion, but she actually gets some good moments here, holding the fort upstairs while the others are playing in the vault, and with that rather wonderful conversation with the Doctor about his family in episode three – we have been seeing a more human and vulnerable Doctor from Troughton over the last few episodes, and this exchange in the first story of the season sets a whole new tone for his relationship with his companions – from Hartnell's grandfatherly character to a more wacky uncle. (I note, on behalf of the shippers, that he is very touchy-feely with Jamie.)

Among the generally good guest cast, Shirley Cooklin's Kaftan is the most notable. She is one of the sexiest characters ever on Who, and brings a definite frisson even to her exchanges with the virginal Victoria. (By coincdence, it is Shirley Cooklin's 80th birthday today; if she is reading this, congratulations!) On top of that, the story looks and sounds good – the opening quarry scenes establish Telos clearly as a real and desolate planet, the Tombs have an integrity of design, and the incidental music (uncredited though see here) is once again excellent.

What strikes me about the earlier stories of this run is that, although Lloyd and Davis had worked very hard to pull Who round to their own vision – writing out Steven, Dodo and the First Doctor; giving up on the historical stories; bringing in Ben, Polly, the Second Doctor and Jamie – they then produced some of the least memorable stories of the era once they had got the show where they wanted it. The quality ticks up noticeably when Victor Pemberton and Peter Bryant take their turns at the helm. There was also clearly a resources problem, with a demand for more and better stories for the same money or less; but I can't help feeling that the seat-of-the-pants method of producing Who may have been a symptom rather than a cause of Lloyd's problems.

It is shocking that Tomb of the Cybermen is the first intact story since The War Machines – not a single story from the original fourth season survives in full. My next run of stories has an even worse casualty rate, and I am still trying to obtain a decent recon of the missing episodes of The Ice Warriors.

< 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 >

A collection of analytical essays about, as the book’s subtitle puts it, “the worldwide spread of extreme shari’a law”, sent me by one of the contributors shortly after its publication in 2005. The eight chapters cover Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia and Afghanistan. They vary in quality (the Nigerian chapter, by the book’s editor, being remarkably poor) and also in approach; and I missed any real synthesis, which might have looked at Bangladesh, Egypt, Algeria, etc, and might also have looked at the comparative strengths of more liberal strands within contemporary Islamic thinking. I suppose such a synthesis would also have had to point out what still cannot be pointed out to the Washington funders (the book was published by Freedom House and has a foreword by James Woolsey), that the war in Iraq probably exacerbated the threat from radical Islamists.

The next in the Chrestomanci series, this time set in a boarding school in a world where witches are persecuted and burned, yet in fact many people have magic powers and are afraid to show them. Diana Wynne Jones is particularly good at portraying children being nasty (and occasionally nice) to each other, and the boarding school setting gives her plenty of scope, with the overt snobbery between the ins and the outs, and the deep-rooted prejudice about magic; Larwood House is clearly one of the (many) sources of Hogwarts. As ever, her main characters are challenged to overcome their imperfections, once again with the help of Chrestomanci who appears abruptly but decisively at quite a late stage in proceedings. I enjoyed this one a lot.

The second in a series of posts about How I Learned To Cook.

After last time’s impassioned discussion about rice, on to an even more sticky subject (at least if you get it right).

I have never been terribly fascinated by the chemistry of cooking; I am generally happy enough to get results without worrying too much about explaining the process by which they are reached. But one rather general point has always been clear to me: most cooking is about making raw food easier to chew. That is why we soften vegetables and pasta by boiling them, and why we generally prefer cooked meat to raw (for those of us who eat it at all).

However, there is a large range of exceptions, and the biggest is the opposite process – making a liquid go thick. There is still something pretty magical about it for me: basic science tells us that if you heat something, eventually you will melt it, yet here the opposite takes place. There are two basic recipes I use all the time which do this: scrambled eggs and white sauce.

I remember as a sixth-former being surprised when one of my friends mentioned scrambled eggs as his favourite snack to cook. But, y’know, he had a point. It is one of the simplest recipes out there, but the output looks very different from the input and tastes very gratifying. It is astonishingly simple. Crack as many eggs as you want (one or two per person) into a pan; add a dash of milk (as much as you would put in tea or coffee) per egg, and the same amount of butter if you like; also add salt and pepper. Then mix it all together (using either a whisk or a wooden spoon) to form a pale yellow viscous mixture (the butter, if you used it, does not need to be integrated as it will melt). Then start heating (on medium if you can take your time, top if you are hungry), and keep stirring. Within a couple of minutes, the egg simply cooks – there is a school of thought that you can turn the heat off once it starts to thicken, but you have to keep stirring. I like to eat it on hot buttered toast, with a sprig of parsley on top if one is available.

Less simple, but also basic for a lot of other good cooking, is the recipe for white sauce/bechamel sauce/roux. When making a fairly thick sauce for pasta, I use roughly 25g (2 tablespoons in US) of both flour and butter and 200 ml (half a US pint) of milk per person. You can’t use coarsely ground flour, and it is easier if you use very finely ground flour; I imagine you can use margarine etc instead of butter with obvious consequences for the taste. Other variations on the basic technique use other liquids than milk (most often stock, which for me means hot water with a stock cube dissolved in it).

First, melt the butter in a saucepan. Then, take it off the heat and add the flour, and stir until it has all gone sticky. Then add the liquid – my technique is to add first small amounts and try and keep consistency with vigorous wooden spoon action; there is also a school of thought which just adds all the liquid and keeps whisking. Once all the liquid is in, add salt and pepper, put it back on the heat and put the heat back on, and keep stirring (again, I am a wooden spoon man, but I suppose other implements can be used). After a few minutes – say five – it should miraculously thicken up, and it is ready (often benefits from a couple more minutes standing off the heat).

I like to throw in a handful of grated cheese once it has thickened; and then pour it onto my pasta (or vegetables – broccoli, for instance). Other versions include a pinch of nutmeg or arrowroot. The basic technique is fundamental to many other recipes. I have become so instinctive about it that I no longer measure out the ingredients and simply judge the amounts by eye; it usually works.

The biggest problem with both scrambled eggs and white sauce is that they require your almost undivided attention for the few crucial minutes of cooking. It is therefore tricky to combine them with other similarly demanding recipes, such as stir-frying; or with other attention-seeking distractions, such as hungry small children. But that is really a matter of planning. (And the children, once old enough, can help stir the pan.)

What Made Now in Northern Ireland by Maurna Crozier
Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter by Russell T. Davies
The Essential Rumi
The End of the Third Age (The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part 4) by J.R.R. Tolkien
The War of the Ring: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Three by J.R.R. Tolkien
Treason of Isengard: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part Two by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Return of the Shadow: The History of The Lord of the Rings, Part One (The History of Middle-Earth, Vol. 6) by J.R.R. Tolkien
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
RG Veda Volume 3 by Clamp
Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction by Michael White
Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Whose Cruden’s Concordance Unwrote the Bible by Julia Keay
1688: A Global History by John E. Wills
The Professor by Charlotte Bronte
Godslayer: Volume II of The Sundering by Jacqueline Carey
Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
The Eternity Code (Artemis Fowl) by Eoin Colfer
Faust – A Tragedy In Two Parts & The Urfaust by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Looking for Jake and Other Stories by China Mieville
Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway
Brother and Sister by Joanna Trollope
Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Book of Lost Tales 1 by J.R.R. Tolkien
A Short History of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James
The Deepest Sea by Charles Barnitz
The Push by Dave Hutchinson
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts
The City & The City by China Mieville
Ark by Stephen Baxter
See How Much I Love You by Luis Leante
The Other Islam: Sufism and the Road to Global Harmony by Stephen Schwartz

Non-Fiction 4 (YTD 12)

Fiction (non-sf) 2 (YTD 9)

SF (non-Who) 9 (YTD 18)

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 9)

6/18 (YTD 11/48) by women (Carey, Austen, DWJ x 2, Le Guin, Mendlesohn)
1/18 (YTD 5/49) by PoC (Deng)
3/18 owned for more than a year (Who Saved Bosnia, The Bodysnatchers, Cat’s Cradle: Warhead)
1/18 reread (Charmed Life), total YTD rereads 3/48
Page count ~6,000 (YTD ~14,400)

This is a pretty tough book, in many ways: the violence and abuse perpetrated by the staff of the mental institution where the story is set is uncomfortable to read (and I have a daughter who is permanently institutionalised, so it cuts rather close to home). Also I was rather dismayed by the racism and sexism of the story: the only black characters are the brutal male nurses (though the narrator is half Native American); the main female character is the Big Evil Nurse (the other women depicted are two prostitutes and the Little Good Nurse, who comes in only at the end). It was probably not Kesey’s intention, but I could see white American men who believe that they are being oppressed taking comfort and inspiration from this novel.

Having said that, it would be the wrong message. The book is about disorder and development – disorder in two senses, the mental disorders that many of the patients suffer and the disorder and subversion that McMurphy brings to the ward, and the opportunities he offers for his fellow inmates to develop n new directions. There is a tremendously cathartic couple of chapters about a deep-sea fishing expedition which almost summarises the entire book. The violent conclusion leaves several key characters dead but gives others the means of liberating themselves. So in the end I was glad to have read it, though I will not come back to it any time soon.

Top LibraryThing Unsuggestion: Biblical Preaching: The Development and Delivery of Expository Messages by Haddon W. Robinson

I’ve been following the activism of Maura McHugh / with interest and sympathy, but I think I now need to de-lurk and do so in practice – sparked by her correspondence with SFX here (a long read but worth it).

In a sense I am poking my nose in here, because I have bought perhaps two issues of SFX in the last ten years and am not really a horror fan; I have heard of very few of the men and women creative artists mentioned in the discussion. On the other hand I am a man who enjoys the genre (defined at its widest); and I would like to be counted as someone who is outraged at this sort of sexism in one of the genre’s leading publications. I was also dismayed by several rhetorical deficiencies in Ian Berriman’s response to Maura McHugh, sufficiently so to catalogue them below the cut.

Berriman: As methods of criticism go, I think that totting up the numbers of contributors or interviewees by category is very reductive, and not a reliable barometer of the politics, aims, or knowledge of the people involved.

On the contrary. Good hard numbers give you data that cannot be denied. The conclusions to be drawn can be debated, but 0 women out of 34 is still 0 however many times you count them.

Berriman: you don’t seem to consider that the features in the finished magazine might not have been the only ones we attempted to produce.

And why should any reader consider that? Literally all we can judge is the final product; readers and critics have absolutely no obligation to consider what the editor might have thought about including. Back in my political days, we had a saying that “If it’s not in the paper, it didn’t happen!” Likewise, if it’s not in the printed copy, it simply doesn’t exist, regardless of what we may know or speculate about editorial intent.

McHugh: I was stunned by the “Horror’s Hidden Treasures” piece. You found the time [my emphasis] to query 34 men for their opinions, but neglected to ask even one woman to recommend an under-rated gem in the horror field.

Berriman: Your second assumption is that we didn’t even consider approaching any women for the Hidden Treasures piece (you suggest they “do not register on SFX’s horror criteria”). Actually there were several women on my mental “wish list” of possible contributors that, in the end, we didn’t contact, basically for reasons of time. [my emphasis]

Note how Berriman challenges an accusation which was not actually made (“didn’t even consider”) – and then refutes it very badly; in the end “we thought about it but couldn’t be bothered to do it” is in some ways a worse excuse than “we made a policy decision not to do it”. McHugh’s actual accusation, that Berriman could not find the time to ask a single woman to contribute to the feature, is completely verified by Berriman’s response (he has a confused coda about emails going astray which rather proves the point).

Berriman’s response is devalued still further when he quotes two anonymous female friends who assure us that he is a nice guy who was just doing his job.

Berriman’s sexism is no doubt unconscious, but we are all conscious beings, so that is a poor excuse. He could learn from Guy Adams, who was similarly called out by McHugh over a horror anthology a few months back, and issued an unreserved apology:

It is disgustingly simple for a man not to notice these things, a blindness to the importance of correct gender representation that I feel embarrassed to have fallen into.

Short of not making the mistake in the first place, that is the only ‘explanation’ that will do, admitting that you screwed up and undertaking to try harder; not telling us that your lady friends think you’re a good egg, not fantasising about the thing you were going to publish but didn’t, and not whining about people daring to count what is in your output. It has been a long time since I bought a copy of SFX, and I think it will be a long time before I buy another one.

This book is precisely what it says on the tin, with a first chapter taking the genre to 1900, a second taking it to 1950, and then individual chapters for each subsequent decade, with two extra chapters for a) J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and b) Philip Pullman, J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett, the whole text weighing in at less than 220 pages (plus index and lists). It doesn’t interrogate the nature of fantasy literature in depth (one of the authors has done that elsewhere) but does define the genre clearly and convincingly, and also looks at when and why particular sub-genres (cute animal fantasies, paranormal romance, Big Commercial Fantasy) have become popular at different times. The authors integrate children’s literature and also genre films and television into the narrative; this is not just about fantasy for grownups. It would be rather a good (and inexpensive) gateway text for the reader of fantasy (and/or sf) who wanted to dip their toe into criticism.

I know I always say this, but when I read books like this I want i) a better understanding of books I have already read and ii) suggestions of books I might read in the future which may appeal to me, and I got plenty of both here; I also was provoked to start thinking (though not sufficiently to complete the thought) about the books which received popular and/or literary acclaim which I just didn’t like (including Little, Big, Light, and The Sword of Shannara). Mostly I found myself nodding in agreement or realisation with just the occasional raised eyebrow – Diana Wynne Jones surely wrote more than four books in the 1970s (p.139)?

For the non-fiction category of the BSFA awards, I have to choose between only two nominees: this book, or Deepa D’s January 2009 blog post “I Didn’t Dream of Dragons“. Of the other three nominees, Hal Duncan has withdrawn his own (excellent if very lengthy) blog post on “Ethics and Enthusiasm” from consideration, recommending instead that people vote for Deepa D; I haven’t seen Interzone recently, which is certainly nobody’s fault other than mine, but means I have no opinion on the merits of Nick Lowe’s “Mutant Popcorn” column in 2009; and although I greatly admire John Clute, the publishers of his Canary Fever have made it abundantly clear on their website that they are not interested in doing business with people like me who don’t have sterling or US dollar bank accounts, so I am unlikely to see it before the voting deadline.

Deepa D’s essay is heartfelt and moving, and was one of the best things to come out of last year’s bruising RaceFail discussions; indeed it ties in to my professional work to a certain extent, which I rarely get with my reading of sff criticism. It was of course only one part of a much wider conversation (and some people, such as Hal Duncan, will vote for it in order to support that conversation as a whole). I will vote for Mendlesohn and James, however, as their book happens to scratch my particular itch; and in the end that is what voting and awards are all about.

…but I know what I like.

Actually, I’m often not really sure what I like, especially in the visual arts, where many years of experience have demonstrated to me that I just don’t really care enough about good graphic design to be particularly good at it. But the BSFA challenges me to cast a vote on the nominees for its award for best artwork, so I have been looking at the entrants.

As ever, I rank them here in reverse order of preference. Also I hope my snipping and inserting here of bits of each artwork can be considered fair use.

I wasn’t wildly impressed by Nitzan Kramer’s alternate cover for Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Taken on its own, it is blocky and cartooney, and the eyes of the giant sea monster seem poorly placed; in context, of course, it misses the point of the book which is about human interactions, the sea monster being a mere incident.

Adam Tredowski has three of his covers for Interzone on the shortlist; the one for issue 220 is imaginative enough but didn’t quite grab me – one meanly suspects that it has been tilted at an angle to try and distract you from the fact that it’s not really clear what the picture is about. Nice contrasts, I admit.

I liked his cover for Interzone #225 slightly better; two minuscule figures pick their way past fantastic and twisted ruined tubular machinery to a blindingly lit gulf (so bright that it almost hurts the eyes). I don’t know if it related to a particular story (Interzone covers don’t always) but I would read whatever this is based on.

Even more so with Tredowski’s cover for Interzone #224, where a green belvedere clings to a fertile escarpment, with a troubled sea lying below and strange habitats (I suppose) floating high above in the background. Somehow the balance of colour and detail works for me here in a rather pleasing way.

Stephanie Pui-Mun Law’s “Emerald” is in a totally different league; an enigmatic image from a dream – a giant tree, a burst of natural vitality; are the figures at its foot supplicants, victims, offspring? I love the sense of energy and mystery about it. This is the only one of the artworks where we are given a legend to help explain what it is about (unless you count “20,000 מיל מתחת למים” for Kramer’s piece), but the description raises more questions than it answers.

In the end though my top vote goes to Stephan Martinière’s cover art for Ian McDonald’s Desolation Road (jacket design by Jacqueline Nasso Cooke). It has a tremendous futuristic feel; it basically tells you that this is a book which includes giant railway trains on Mars, which is accurate enough. The sense of confrontation between the human figure and the locomotive engine is palpable; so is the idea that we are seeing just one part of a big, big world. The concept is slightly similar to Tredowski’s Interzone #225 cover, but I prefer the way it is done here.

I have to say that I approve whole-heartedly of giving the award to individual artworks rather than to artists as the Hugos do. It seems to me that if the other awards are for individual works of fiction or non-fiction, art should be treated the same way.

Sorry to see that the venerable Greek diplomat Viron Theodoropoulos has died at the age of 90. I only met him once, a few years ago at a conference, but he made a vivid impression: in the late 1970s he had masterminded Greece’s negotiations to join the then European Economic Community, and even in his mid-80s he retained a certain rhetorical flair. He liked to point out that he was named after Lord Byron, who is of course spelt Βύρων in Greek.

Over the conference dinner I was teasing Theodoropoulos about Greek foreign policy mistakes of the twentieth century, but he surprised me by agreeing with me vehemently when we got onto Cyprus: “I told the King, your policy is disastrous! It will be bad for Cyprus and very bad for you! The British will never fiorgive you! And when his son had to flee the country ten years later, I knew I had warned them! But it was too late!”

A very junior British diplomat was sitting next to me and, once Theodoropoulos’ attention had wandered, he asked me to explain to him why the Greek king’s policy on Cyprus might have annoyed the British. I pointed out that in the 1950s the Greeks had been funding and arming EOKA which killed a rather large number of British troops and administrators on the island. (And I’m afraid I didn’t quite manage to hide my astonishment that a British diplomat, even a very young one, wasn’t aware of this major glitch in Anglo-Greek relations.)

I’m glad to find that Theodoropoulos was still capable of annoying hardliners on this issue as recently as May 2008. He will deservedly rest in peace.

When I was about twelve I read all I could find of Diana Wynne Jones’ books – of course in those days she had not written so many, so it was easier – and loved them: Wilkins’ Tooth, The Ogre Downstairs, Dogsbody, Eight Days of Luke, Power of Three, Charmed Life and Cart and Cwidder (I don’t think I remember the other Dalemark book, Drowned Ammet). But I confess I had not really kept up with her later work – I think I’ve read only Archer’s Goon, The Homeward Bounders, Deep Secret and most recently The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

Anyway, when I did my what-shall-I-read-in-2010 poll, the three Chrestomanci books on my shelves were clearely ahead of all but Guy Gavriel Kay and The Wee Free Men. So I decided to get into them by rereading Charmed Life first.

February Books 14) Charmed Life, by Diana Wynne Jones

I remember vividly the Jackanory reading of Charmed Life, shortly after its publication in 1977 when I was about ten; investigation reveals that the reader was Sorcha Cusack and the illustrations by Lorraine Calaora (I particularly remember a picture of Fiddle the cat). I also remember enjoying the book first time round thirty years ago, though finding it rather creepier than the Jackanory version (which I guess may have toned down some of Gwendolyn’s nasty moments). I am glad to say that the magic remains: Cat and Gwen are orphans, trying to navigate an vividly realised adult world which is rather like our Edwardian era with magic as an accepted if not always trusted way of life; Cat is the viewpoint character, so we only gradually appreciate how Gwendolyn’s nastiness to him actually goes much deeper than normal family tension. The other great thing about the book (apart from the character of Chrestomanci himself) is of course the concept of parallel worlds, where history has gone differently but almost everyone still lives there, if with different names and personalities. I loved rereading it.

February Books 15) The Magicians of Caprona, by Diana Wynne Jones

Next in publication order (which apparently is the recommended reading order rather than internal chronology) is The Magicians of Caprona, set in an Italy which remains a union of city-states (in the same world as Charmed LifeRomeo and Juliet, in the two great magical families locked in bitter feuding, is fairly obvious but there is a lot else going on here, with several pairs of children of each family (and their cats) allying against a more powerful enemy, which is exploiting the adults’ blind spots to try and destroy the city. There’s a great sense of architecture as well as a good moral lesson about not being afraid to define your own individuality. I was a little less convinced by the portrayal of the family dynamics here, normally one of DWJ’s strong points.

I did notice that the evil antagonists in both books are powerful magical women, which I think is also true in Wilkins’ Tooth and Dogsbody