If you know what I look like in RL, see if you can spot me on this photograph:

http://www.rathmorereunion2010.co.uk/

Continuing my occasional dips into classic literature with this intense stream-of-consciousness tale of a poor Mississippi family, fulfilling their wife and mother’s dying wish to be buried in her inconveniently distant home town. The family dynamics are weird and understated, and the time sequencing is occasionally jarring between the dozen or so different narrators. But the various voices feel very authentic, consistent in word and thought, and it feels like Faulkner supplied a stylistic model that others have followed (it reminded me of both Orson Scott Card and Terry Bisson, two authors from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum). An absorbing and somewhat disturbing book.

This is a fascinating might-have-been, a six episode script for the first season of Doctor Who telling the story of a murder conspiracy against Alexander the Great, by Moris Farhi. It is moderately thrilling stuff: the plot is tight; the characterisation of the Tardis team, Alexander and his generals very good; the sense of historical predestination also consistent with Who as it developed.

But it could never have been made. It’s not because of the numerous hostages to continuity offered by Farhi’s script – language-teaching machine in the Tardis, the Doctor’s belief in God, Susan’s statements about their home time – these would have been weeded out in the editorial process. It is not even that the Tardis crew don’t really impact events (though that is a weakness of the story). It is simply that it is too sad: Alexander’s three closest friends all fall victims to the conspirators, followed by Alexander himself, leaving his realm to be divided between the complicit Seleucus and the loyal Ptolemy. As one of the commentaries in this edition puts it, Barbara and Susan shed more tears in this script than Rose Tyler does in her entire career.

We also have a bonus here, a single episode story (or perhaps the last episode of an unwritten longer story), The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance, in which the Tardis crew visits a planet where one of the locals literally dies of love for Barbara. It is also too sad to ever have been turned into a broadcast story, but I think that today’s fanficcers would love it – it’s totally in tune with the idea of takiing the show’s characters to places that the show’s writers never could.

So this is strongly recommended, though for slightly different reasons than I though it might be: good emotional character-driven writing, and a glimpse of how Doctor Who mght have been.

This cartoon is in today’s European Voice, along with a profile of Catherine Ashton:

There is no explanation in the article of why she is depicted in this way, so a lot of European Voice readers will be mildly puzzled.

I saw a reference to this in Michael Moorcock’s article about writing a Doctor Who book and got it from Project Gutenberg. It is a hundred years old this year, having been published on early 1909.

Moorcock describes this as a “funny, futuristic” book, but it is really a parody of the invasion scare sub-genre. I have read a few other books in that genre – The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers, When William Came by Saki, and a collection edited by I.F. Clarke.

Moorcock is, however, correct to describe it as funny, despite the incomprehensible contemporary cultural references and unpleasant racial stereotypes (which as far as I remember are largely absent from later Wodehouse). England is invaded by nine different armies, ranging from the Germans and Russians down to the forces of Monaco and the Mad Mullah of Somaliland (the latter driven to further derangement by a meeting with Irish Nationalist leader John Dillon). The occupied English grumble about the disruption to cricket and the theatre caused by the invaders, but this is resolved when the German and Russian commanders agree to appear as music-hall acts.

Clarence Chugwater, the somewhat nerdy Boy Scout who is Wodehouse’s comic hero, manages to sow dissension between the German and Russian leaders by way of his day-job at an entertainment weekly. The two armies come close to wiping each other out, the Boy Scouts capture the survivors, and England is saved. Hurrah! (In the unlikely event that anyone feels I have spoiled the ending for them, I would point out that all is revealed in the very first chapter.)

This is not a good starting place for reading Wodehouse’s works. (Indeed, it wasn’t even a very good starting place foir writing Wodehouse’s works.) But it is an interesting intersection of the fringes of the sf genre with his rather different genius when both were at an early stage of development.

The Waters of Mars was shown while I was driving across southern Connecticut to catch my plane from JFK last weekend, so it was a day or two before I caught up with it. I enjoyed it. I think RTD is rather good at the base-under-siege stories, and Lindsay Duncan, who I don’t think I had seen before, was superb as Adelaide. (Has anyone remarked on the fact that this story was headed by two Scottish actors putting on English accents?)

Many electrons have been distorted (you can find all the links from ) in discussion of whether the ending worked in terms of Adelaide, the Doctor, and Time. I was satisfied with Adelaide. She took agency back from the Doctor, even though it meant her own destruction; of course, she did this because she knew what her death would mean, and valued that ahead of her life.

The Doctor has now been without a regular companion since Donna left. (We also have a whole bunch of companionless Tenth Doctor books and audios released this year, for those who are prepared to take their Who outside the TV canon.) Donna told him at their first meeting that he needs someone to tell him when to stop, and that latent part of his character was made manifest in the climax of The Waters of Mars. It’s a dramatic twist to show us a flawed hero – still recognisably the same person, but seen by us (and himself) in a different way.

I do hope that The End of Time delivers. RTD has not given us a satisfactory season-ending episode since Doomsday.

I got home to find The Circus of Doom, episode three of the new The Hornet’s Nest series, with Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, waiting for me. A half-day in Paris on Thursday gave me time to listen to it as I walked from the Gare du Nord to my meeting at the Tuileries and back. Unfortunately I wasn’t wildly impressed; it seemed to me too similar to the second episode, The Dead Shoes, with the added demerit of a comedy foreign disabled character (played very well by Stephen Thorne, but that doesn’t really help). I do hope that the fourth and fifth episodes, due out at the start of next month, are an improvement.

As I drove across Connecticut last weekend, I was listening to The Adventure of the Diogenes Damsel, one of the Bernice Summerfield plays released just over a year ago. It is a sequel to my favourite New Adventure, All-Consuming Fire, and features two brilliant actors, David Warner playing Mycroft Holmes and Peter “Nyder” Miles as the evil alien, as well as of course Lisa Bowerman herself. It would alas be slightly incomprehensible to those who don’t know All-Consuming Fire but was great fun and consoled me for missing the broadcast on the other side of the Atlantic.

Well, I have very nearly caught up with myself after my 17-day trip which included five countries, five hotels and three overnight flights. I can’t write much here about the actual trip to Juba, but I can share with you some of the photographs I took (below the cut):

This is me in front of the Nile, looking toward the Juba Bridge, taken at Da Vinci’s restaurant

These are my colleagues G and S, old Africa hands both, at our (second) hotel; it was my first trip to the continent, but both of them have been living and working in Africa for over thirty years

We paid our respects at the tomb of the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, Dr John Garang, killed in a helicopter crash four years ago shortly after he had signed the treaty that ended the long-running war

Dr John Garang’s principles live on

Robert, our (Kenyan) taxi driver – call him on +249 955 037 341

The White Nile (properly the Bahr al Jabal) and Juba, from the air

Village seen from the air

The Ethiopian restaurant where I had my first injera and wot

The mango tree I blogged about

Lizard seen in the forecourt of the hotel

Another lizard – different species?

Hope I go back some day.

• reading_gibbon: Chapter IX: The state of Germany till the invasion of the Barbarians
  This chapter does what it says in the title, giving us an account of the Germans largely (and occasionally critically) based on Tacitus, and ending by wondering why they did not make more effort to attack Rome between Varus [9 AD] and Decius [251 AD] (the explanations given being lack of metal technology, and too much internal dissent). But Gibbon also uses it to attach a lot of other philosophical speculation, in particular about the politics, social life and culture of the German tribes as precursors of the civilisation of Western Europe (in particular of course England).
  (tags: gibbon)

November Books 17) Time Of Your Life, by Steve Lyons

I rather enjoyed this vicious satire on television, including biting swipes at Mary Whitehouse and the cancellation of Old Who in 1989; meanwhile the Doctor, just poist-Trial, is wracked with guilt about Peri and with unease about what will happen when he meets Mel. This is the story that Vengeance on Varos was trying to be. (And also has an eerie pre-echo of The Long Game and Bad Wolf.) Introduction of two companions, one of whom is killed off and the other apparently in another couple of spinoff novels.

November Books 18) Millennial Rites, by Craig Hinton

This was the first book I had read by the late Craig Hinton, and I thoroughly enjoyed it: resurrecting Anne Travers from The Web of Fear, references also to The InvasionThe TV Movie, let alone Army of Ghosts.) And as an extra bonus the book is a sort-of prequel to All-Consuming Fire, my favourite of the New Adventures. It also follows through on the logic of the Valeyard from the Trial of a Time Lord, which is less exciting for me but it all hangs together rather well. I shall look out for more of Hinton’s books.

November Books 19) Spiral Scratch, by Gary Russell

Russell wrote Beautiful Chaos, which is my favourite of the New Series Adventures, but this is rather journeyman stuff. In particular, the writing style of the opening passages is very clunky indeed. Eventually he settles down to the story of multiple Doctors and Mels across different universes and pursued by giant time-travelling lampreys, but it’s not his best work.

In summary, both Time Of Your Life and Millennial Rites are rather good, and Spiral Scratch improves after a weak start.

…and I am not being even slightly ironic:

She has a full-sized Dalek in her living room.

• sevenorora: The British "press" at its best?
  Fair comment
  (tags: eu Belgium)
• qcjeph: Seriously, stop it
  Couldn’t agree more!
  (tags: humour funny internet livejournal)

…that is, not the second half of it. I have to say that Cathy Ashton has not made a big splash in her first year in Brussels; the next few years may be a different matter.

More or less by coincidence, this is the second book about Congo that I have read this month. This is the story of an earlier era, of the awful exploitation, rape and murder of vast numbers of Africans under the personal supervision of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Hochschild admits that precise figures are difficult to establish with confidence, but it seems pretty clear that ten million people, half of the population, were killed by Leopold’s regime. He got away with it by a cunning combination of concealment of the amount of wealth he was extracting for his own private hoard, wishful thinking from the white world about the heroic civilising mission of European colonialism, and the conspiratorial silence of the officials involved. For any European, and particularly for us Belgians (as I have now been for a bit over a year), it is essential reading as a reminder of the atrocities of our shared past with Africa.

Hochschild’s subtitle is “A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa”. The heroism described is mostly that of the few investigators who dared to tell the truth of the mutilations, murders and slavery that characterised Leopold’s Congo, the likes of E.D. Morel and Roger Casement. Hochschild regrets that there are very few accounts available from the African perspective. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is about the destructive moral effect of the Congo experience on Europeans like Kurtz; the Africans in the story do not speak, and they were rarely allowed to tell their story in real life either.

My office is a stone’s throw from the Parc du Cinquantenaire / Jubelpark, created in the suburb beyond Etterbeek by Leopold II from his vast Congolese profits. It contains a rather disturbing monument to the Congo enterprise, as well as the pretentious archway which frames the end of the Rue de la Loi / Wetstraat. A favourite excursion for the children is to the Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, where the stuffed animals are cute but the historical record is, in more than one sense of the word, whitewashed. As Hochschild points out, the legacy of the colonial enterprise is visible in the streets of Belgium today, if you know where to look, or indeed if you just look with your eyes open.

• "I am not a number! I am a free bland!":The Prisoner
  I had been looking forward tothis, but it sounds like it was pretty terrible. One comment that caught my eye:

  "A few days ago, I would have been willing to watch Sir Ian McKellen read the phonebook in a genial but vaguely menacing manner. Now I feel like I already have."

  (tags: theprisoner)
• Europe’s global credibility in the balance | Charlemagne’s notebook | Economist.com
  "It is hard to convey to outsiders the narcissistic parochialism of Brussels at the moment."
  (tags: eu)

I spent last weekend in the unlikely location of the UConn campus in Storrs, Connecticut, at a conference on Elizabeth I and Ireland. As some of you know, I have an unhealthy obsession with my ancestor, Sir Nicholas White, who was a senior political figure in 16th-century Ireland until he died in the Tower of London in 1592. I have a vague ambition to do some more research on him one of these days, and this conference, which meshed nicely with a work trip to the US, was an opportunity to dip my toe in the waters of Irish Tudor studies.

It was well worth it. Several of the speakers quoted from Nicholas White’s correspondence; several more are working him into their current research projects; and only one person gave me a funny look when I explained my interest. I came away very motivated to pursue further research on my 9xgreat-grandfather, and with numerous leads to follow up. Also, and this is not a negligible point, the Nathan Hale Inn on the university campus was by far the most comfortable of the five hotels I stayed in at various points over the last two weeks. (The fire alarm that went off at 2.15 am on the last night was probably not their fault.)

I was struck, not for the first time, about the difference between panels at this sort of conference and at sf cons. Everyone here had carefully compiled papers (in a couple of cases, rather too long for the time available), all decently footnoted, which one can (and does) request copies of by email afterwards. Just a bit different from the fandom panel where the people up front get to burble about whatever they like, and the anarchic culture of fandom is if anything rather prejudiced against structured presentations. The conferences I attend in my professional capacity tend to be halfway in between, in that speakers are not normally expected to have a written presentation of academic quality, but the speaking order and Q&A are usually fairly tightly structured. (Looking for an example of this, I found this event which I spoke at some years back, where in fact most of the speakers did have prepared statements, and the whole thing was correspondingly less enjoyable.)

I must say that the more thought given to the structure of such an event, and the greater the level of shared expectations between organisers and participants about what will happen, the more everyone will get out of it, and the Elizabeth I and Ireland conference was an excellent example of that coming together. Kudos to Brendan Kane, the main organiser, who also took the trouble to help me sort out my accommodation once I arrived.

(No love to the traffic in south-eastern Connecticut, however. When I drove from NY to Boston back in 2005 I swore I would never do that again, and now I remember why.)

I only realised after reading this that I had already heard the excellent audio adaptation which includes Sophie Aldred and Anneke Wills. The original book is very good too, and I think would be reasonably penetrable for someone who hadn’t previously followed the Bernice Summerfield stories. Nicely observed emotional politics between and among Benny and her students, and the various aliens with whom Benny’s ex gets them involved. To a certain extent I felt it was the story that Colony In Space should have been. A good one (only the second Benny novel I have read, the first being the equally enjoyable Walking to Babylon).

As ever, a reliably hilarious tale of antics in Florida – this time with less political commentary than some of the other Hiaasen books I have read, but compensated by even more vivid characters, only one of whom is too unpleasant to be believable. Excellent stuff.

This is a short but tough play. At the opening, Medea resents Jason for bringing her to Corinth and then abandoning her for the local princess: she swears revenge, and using her own children by Jason as unwitting tools, poisons both the king and the princess (and the kids too). It’s a horrible but believable scenario, and Medea, despite her monstrous decisions, comes across as a sympathetic character.

If I were ever in the unlikely position of staging this, I think there are three big questions arising from the script. First off, Jason – idiot, philanderer, or Machiavellian? It’s not at all clear from what Euripides gives us. I think I would prefer to have him making clear-eyed political decisions, and then devastated by Medea’s sabotage. Second, the Chorus – in today’s theatre, really you would want her to be a single female character, observing and commenting, but also participating and encouraging. And third, the slightly weird thing is that the entire play takes place in the street outside Medea’s house – which therefore becomes not a place of domesticity but a mysterious location which people enter and from which they emerge changed. This may not have fazed the ancient Greeks who expected the three unities to be preserved, but a modern audience will wonder why we never see inside the buildings.

Anyway, it’s a powerful character study of a wronged woman exacting revenge. Rather thrilling.

This is a rather unusual Hugo winner. It’s a curious amalgam of the great post-holocaust novels Earth Abides and After London on the one hand, and the suspicion of clones latent in Brave New World on the other. The depiction of sexual politics as humanity tries to reinvent itself is core to the narrative: the clones’ society turns out to be intellectually and biologically sterile, and their sequestration of fertile women to drug-addled maternity is pretty appalling. I felt that Wilhelm was asking some pretty serious questions here, if not necessarily providing the answers; in any case, as an author rather than a politician, the former rather than the latter is her responsibility.

For once I have actually read all of the other Hugo nominees that year – Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman, Children of Dune by Frank Herbert, Man Plus by Frederik Pohl and Shadrach in the Furnace by Robert Silverberg. I must say I would have found this a difficult choice: all of them are somewhat difficult and disturbing books, none of them obvious classics but all memorable in a certain way. In the end I would probably have voted for Mindbridge since the sex scenes are more entertaining than those in Shadrach in the Furnace (though of course in the counterfactual situation where I actually had a vote that year I would have been 10, so that particular factor would not have mattered so much to me). I think this was one of those rare years where the Hugo went to a somewhat unlikely candidate, and was all the stronger for it.

I love Les Miserables, both the novel and the show (NB to those who know only the latter – Gavroche is the Thenardiers’ son and therefore Eponine’s sister), and of course everyone knows the stereotype of the Hunchback, so I was looking forward to reading this. It’s a novel of biting social commentary, though set far in the past (1483); the innocent Esmeralda is exploited, persecuted and condemned by the ruling classes, her only defenders the unreliable denizens of the underworld and a disabled bell-ringer. (And her pet goat.) It starts awfully slowly – Hugo takes a very long time to clear his throat, as it were – but the characters are largely engaging, and the action accelerates towards the climax. Knowing that it had been made into a Disney film, which presumably must have a happy ending though I haven’t seen it, I was in a state of considerable suspense as to how Hugo would resolve the situation and save the central characters.

It hadn’t occurred to me that Disney might have changed the story, so the ending came as a rather brutal shock.

I must say that I still think Les Miserables is the better book, but Notre Dame de Paris is very interesting in the way it takes a lot of the same themes and puts them together with rather different effect.

She has been deported to Spain, apparently because she wrote “Western Sahara” rather than “Morocco” as her country of residence on her immigration form and refused to change it. In terms of international law she is entirely correct, but to assert that the people of Western Sahara should have their country back is in violation of the Moroccan constitution.

I don’t often post work-specific stuff here but this is so outrageous that I must.

Aminatou Haidar is a human rights activist from the Western Sahara, most of which has been occupied by Morocco for the last thirty years. Last year she was given the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights AwardCivil Courage Prize. On her return to the Western Sahara yesterday morning, she was arrested by the Moroccans, purportedly for failing to complete her immigration form on landing.

This was pretty much announced in advance by King Mohammed VI of Morocco in a speech a week ago, when he announced that “it is time to stop outlaws taking advantage of civic freedoms to agitate from within”. This in turn was probably helped by Hillary Clinton the week before endorsing the Moroccan policy on the illegal occupation of other people’s territory.

I know some of you guys are fans of Hillary’s, but really this is disgusting. The EU is not much better. It can put out a statement condemning Azerbaijan’s treatment of bloggers, but I haven’t heard a peep from them on the arrest of someone who happens to be awkward for the Moroccans. It is a shameful performance.

…Michael Moorcock to write Doctor Who book.

Of course, he has already included the Doctor and a Dalek in one of his earlier works!

A collection of four short graphic stories, each centred around a social misfit and showimg him or her both as they see themselves and as they are seen by others, with sometimes brutal clarity. Tomine’s ability to depict multiple viewpoints is pretty amazing. Few of his characters are particularly likeable but they are all fascinating.

The day the Wall fell, I split up with my girlfriend. She had moved to a different city, and the long-distance thing wasn’t working; I went to visit her that Thursday evening, and we had an intense conversation over drinks and pizza, vaguely aware that people were staring at the television screens but assuming it was some sports event. By the time we had worked out that we had both reached the same conclusion about the future of the relationship, I had missed the last train; we went back to her place, I slept on the couch and got up early to go home. And then I bought a newspaper and discovered that while one (short and mostly sweet) chapter of my life was ending, the world had changed forever.

I first went to Berlin in 1986, over the long weekend of German Unity Day which was then on June 17, hitch-hiking there with a friend who I was working with in Heilbronn way off in the southeast. In those days Berlin was a slightly hippyish enclave (the hostel we stayed in was very hippyish and slightly threatening) on the front line of the Cold War. The inner German border remains the most vigorously fortified frontier I have ever seen. We went east as well as west (by tram to Frieedrichstraße), and took pictures of the Brandenburg Gate from both sides which I guess I must still have somewhere; I went to an eastern bookshop and made the mistake of referring to "Ost-Berlin" (rather than "Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR"). At that point the Wall had been up for almost 25 years and looked like it would remain a lot longer.

I went back with Anne in 1992. It was utterly transformed, of course. I cried as we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, which had appeared so utterly blocked by historical circumstance and concrete fortification only a few years before. The west of the city had found a new security and confidence, a strong sense of liberation; the east was still shell-shocked by defeat. The transport system, now unified, charged considerably less to former easterners buying tickets. The frenzy of new build was just getting going but the momentum wasn’t yet there. Since then I’ve been back perhaps half a dozen times. Earlier this year I took an afternoon to retrace the Wall, helpfully marked out by bricks in the road. It remains a fascinating city for me, and every time I go I find something new.

The BBC has a handy list of walls that remain, including two of which I have direct experience (Belfast and the Green Line in Nicosia) and another which I work on (the Moroccan berm closing off the illegally occupied part of the Western Sahara). Just as the Berlin Wall disturbed me in 1986, any restriction like this disturbs me now. Robert Frost wrote "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall"; his New Hampshire boundary markers were threatened by natural forces, perhaps elves, built by old stone savages. The conflict-built walls of the world are also perpetually under threat from the erosive force of history. And a good thing too.

I read this book sitting beside its author on a trans-Atlantic plane flight, which is an unusual level of interaction. It is a tremendously detailed account of how, in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, the new Rwandan government invaded its neighbour Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) kicking off a conflict that sucked in military interventions from Burundi, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, Chad, Sudan and Namibia, and which also entangled Libya, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Zambia and South Africa before it ended in 2002. Roughly four million people were killed. The conflict was complex and remote, and got almost no coverage in international media. The Rwandans essentially got a free pass from the rest of the world because of the genocide, and because nobody like the Zairean/DRC rulers. Prunier details the horror that resulted, and does not spare his criticism of the local and international actors who made it possible. He even criticises his own earlier book on Rwanda, where he admits having believed the government when he should not have. (Interesting to note that his Rwanda book is quoted several times by Jared Diamond in Collapse.)

An excellent final chapter reflects that probably there will not be another African conflict that is as far-reaching geographically, although the basic conditions for future smaller wars remain. Prunier also analyses the failure of international policy-makers to get to grips with the realities of African political life. I found this point particularly compelling (it should be read as if all in the present tense):

These states were universally weak because they lacked both legitimacy and money. Legitimacy was the biggest problem because even those states that did or could have money, such as the mining states, were also weak. Loyalty to the state is not an internalised feeling in today’s Africa… Internally states are seen as cows to be milked. But because there is little milk and the cow can go dry at any time, it would perhaps be better to say that the state is a cow to be bled quickly before it slips into somebody else’s hands. The state is an asset for the group in power, but that asset is fragile, there are no commonly accepted rules for future devolution of power, and things have to be grabbed while they last… The state is always somebody’s state, never the State in the legal abstract form beloved of Western constitutional law. It is the Museveni dictatorship for the Acholi [Uganda], the Arab state for th southern Sudanese, the mestiço state for UNITA [Angola], or the Tutsi state for the Hutu [Rwanda]. When tribes are not the main problem, pseudo-tribes or other groupings will do.

There is nothing deterministic about conflict: these wars begin because of rational choices made by individuals in leadership positions, reacting to the set of circumstances they find themselves in. Ending them, however, is much more difficult.

A totally fascinating book looking at how the human impact on the environment can cause societies to collapse or disappear. The particularly memorable chapters are on Easter Island and the Viking settlements on Greenland, both cases where the natural resources were exploited to the point of mass death. There are lots of other case studies as well, mostly dealing with larger societies or states, but none quite as dramatic or as detailed.

The final chapters are an excellent synthesis of the message of the book. Diamond has a not very profound but interesting take on the nature of political decision-making, and why it goes wrong; on business and the environment (I would like to know more about the Marine Stewardship Council, and why it has had so little impact in Europe), and finally on future prospects for saving the world, where he is cautiously optimistic but not complacent. He is clear that our current patterns of environmental exploitation are not sustainable, but hopes that a sufficiently conscious public will be able to pressurise its leaders into taking action. The book will certainly help.

This is the book which begins by describing its heroine as "blond [rather than blonde] and ovately willowy". Thanks to everone who has speculated on the meaning of the last two words there; I guess I am convinced that she is thin with wide, childbearing hips, but it is possible to imagine a more comprehensible description.

Anyway, Freda Caron is a botanist working on some strange flowers from a newly discovered planet. That's basically the plot. Boyd appears to be trying to say deep things about sexuality and sexual politics, and the nature of humanity, but it really doesn't work. I was surprised to discover that the book dates from as late as 1969; it feels of an earlier 60s vintage. The ending, whereFreda gives birth to a plant-human hybrid, is particularly silly.

The book I am reading right now begins by describing the heroine as “Blond and ovately willowy”.

If you think you know what the author meant by “ovately willowy”, please explain to me in comments. Extra points if you identify the novel in question.

(I am about to get on a twelve-hour transatlantic flight from Istanbul to New York so it will be a while before I can respond.)

No actual plot, just a series of very short vignettes of cities each of which embodies some aspect of human social interactions, told as a set of reminiscences by Marco Polo to his ruler / leader / captor, the Great Khan. Some of them are pretty vivid; they would have been more memorable if I weren’t on a red-eye flight reading them.