I got my jabs for my Africa trip eleven days ago, and they warned me at the hospital that I might suffer a reaction from the yellow fever one within five to ten days. Sure enough, I was groggy all last week and totally knocked out for most of Tuesday. By yesterday, though, I thought I was over it.

However I came home yesterday with a severe pain in the left biceps. Not quite where the tetanus / polio jab went in, but within a few centimetres, and I seem to remember a similar reaction to tetanus jabs before. Saw the doctor this morning who diagnosed an inflammation of the muscle (which is really a symptom rather than a condition) and prescribed industrial-strength ibuprofen. Am rather fed up with all this.

Oh dear…

The place I will be staying in the first week of November is visible on Google Earth, with photographs, at 4°50’25” N, 31°37’5″ E – reassuring to see what it looks like, though I guess the photos won’t convey the temperature.

I am thinking about which Doctor Who stories fit into the steampunk sub-genre – indeed, some of them are elderly enough to have helped inspire it. Come to think of it, the whole concept of the programme, in which the leading actor, born in the reign of Edward VII was made up to look ten years older and in control of technology centuries further advanced, is part of the cultural mix from which steampunk emerged.

One has to be careful not to just include any story with a 19th-century or early 20th-century setting. There is nothing in the least steampunkish about The Gunfighters or Timelash, for instance, despite the supposed 19th-century setting of thee one and the presence of the young H.G. Wells in the other (and one would have to stretch a long way to include Pyramids of Mars or Black Orchid). But I think it’s pretty clear that the following could be considered at least a little steampunk:

Evil of the Daleks – Victorian inventor produces time machine – what more could you want?

Talons of Weng Chiang – granted that the technology itself is not indigenous to the 19th century, but the attitude to Asian people certainly is. (And the recent Big Finish sequel, The Mahogany Murders, is definitely steampunk.)

Enlightenment – the sailing ships may be from all parts of history, and the centre of historical gravity probably nearer the 18th than 19th century, but really, I look at it and I say “steampunk!”

Tooth and Claw – rather than The Unquiet Dead, even though they both have 19th-century settings, because T&C has Queen Victoria and a telescope rather than ghosts and leaking gas.

(Imagine if The Red Fort had ever been made…)

Various thoughts about audios and books, but I’ll pause here.

• BBC NEWS | Europe | Movie star plays Georgian leader
  Andy Garcia to play Saakashvili in big-budget Holywood movie about last year’s war filmed in Tbilisi. Meanwhile Emir Kusturica will be in South Ossetia, directing a film taking the other point of view. I am not making this up.
  (tags: caucasus war films)

The author is a researcher for the Stephen Fry quiz show QI, and the book basically reads like an extended set of QI rounds about funny words in foreign languages, all mildly amusing. I spotted one spelling error – the excellent Serbian word inat is given as iant – and there may be others, but I will not be consumed by vengeful spite over it; also I imagine there is room for interpretation of some of the definitions, such as the 10 Albanian ways of describing a moustache, which to be do not seem very different from the ways we describe different moustaches in English.

Going back to spelling, I was a bit dubious of the example given of a word with five consecutive consonants – cmrlj which is Slovenian for bumble-bee – first off, “lj” is a single letter in Slovenian and second I think the “r” is basically functioning as a vowel there. (If you are trying to say it to yourself, remember that “c” is pronounced “ts”.) However there is no doubting the authenticity of the Dutch word with eight consecutive consonants, angstschreeuw – linguists may cry out in fear and horror that “ch” is a single phoneme, but it is spelt with two letters. (Again, if you are trying to say that to yourself, remember that “s” and “ch” are pronounced distinctly in Dutch, unlike in German.)

Like the TV programme it is based on, the book is a little too pleased with its own cleverness, but fun all the same.

And thank you for everything!

• Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter – The New Adventures of Stephen Fry
  Stephen Fry apologises to Poland and has interesting thoughts on Twitter and democracy
  (tags: internet)
• What was communism? | open Democracy News Analysis
  (tags: world)

I knew Brendan Bradshaw, genial and intellectual priest and historian, while I was a student at Cambridge – indeed, I asked him to marry me, but unfortunately he wasn’t available on the day. (I will wait while you unscramble that sentence.)

I hadn’t realised how big a contribution this book had been to Irish historical studies. It is a micro-study of one policy area concentrated on a period of a few years and geographically restricted mainly to the core areas of English rule in Ireland. But he puts forward, entirely convincingly, the evidence that the suppression of the Irish monasteries was driven at least as much by local circumstances and leaders as by the demands of Henry VIII, and that in fact it was no big deal – the monasteries had long since lost their way as centres of spiritual leadership, or even providers of public welfare, and had become blocks on economic and political development. The monks were in general easily bought off, and the only demonstration of popular protest against their dissolution was the successful mobilisation of public opinion in Dublin to save Christ Church Cathedral. The policy enabled Henry VIII to pull the Gaelic lords (and the Earl of Desmond) more tightly into his project of transforming Ireland from a Lordship to a Kingdom, with considerable success.

Of course, I’m reading this as background for my own Tudor Ireland project. One James White, the recorder of Waterford, is recorded as having visited Cork in the spring of 1541 in order to help survey and dissolve the monasteries in both city and county. It’s not an uncommon name, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is the same James White who was my direct ancestor and died of poisoning while visiting London five years later.

• Ask Nicola: trembling with rage
  Woman denied the right to comfort her dying partner because they were a same-sex couple
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender ushealth)

I am always a bit nervous about returning to books I enjoyed when I was much younger. Will the magic survive? I had fond memories of Farmer’s four-part Riverboat series, despite the very unsatisfactory ending, and the peculiarly anal accuracy of some descriptions (“the mountains were seven miles or 11265 metres high”, if I remember correctly from one of the later books). There is a brilliant central sensawunda concept: all of humanity who ever lived (up to the year 2008, and who survived past the age of seven) are resurrected on the shores of a world-twisting river, apparently as some gigantic social anthropology experiment. Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) attempts to find out What Is Really Going On, aided in later volumes by Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain.

Coming back to the first book 25 years after I first read it, I am sorry to say that I found it pretty dire. Farmer is too dazzled by the audacious brilliance of his concept to actually write interesting characters or settings – one early warning is when he writes himself into the book, as Peter Joseph Frigate, to tell us just how interesting Burton is. There are numerous blunders of racial or gender sensitivity, of which the most boringly repetitive is a bizarre fixation with Hermann Göring. Extraordinarily, everyone in the world gets bacon and eggs for breakfast, steak for dinner, and marijuana to smoke in between. And yet nothing is actually resolved in plot terms in the book. I’m afraid that this goes right to the bottom of the Hugo winners on my list, keeping company with They’d Rather Be Right, Hominids, The Gods Themselves and Neuromancer.

(One problem I had with the book which I suspect is not Farmer’s fault – my memory of the original version of the erotic encounter between Burton and Alice Liddell in Chapter 8 was that they explicitly have drug-fuelled sex, but the relevant paragraphs seem to have been cut from my recently acquired 1998 Ballantine edition; is my memory of the 1971 original incorrect? Or is it a peculiar act of censorship by Ballantine/Del Rey?)

Other Hugo nominees that year were The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin, Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey, Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny, and that year’s Nebula winner, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. I don’t think I have read the McCaffrey; the other three are all manifestly better novels than To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but I guess lacked the sensawunda that Hugo voters like.

I haven’t been following this issue lately, so was a bit alarmed to see a tweet from Sophie in’t Veld MEP, saying that while the Liberal in the European Parliament will oppose the “three strikes” law cutting off access to the internet, the Socialists and Christian Democrats are in favour of it. Can anyone point me at the latest on this?

• vowels
  Where do vowels come from?
  (tags: linguistics)

I had literally no expectations of this book before I started it, and was interested to discover that it is about an American family in Africa, given that I’m due to go to the continent for the first time myself in two weeks.

The Price family move to the Belgian Congo as Baptist missionaries in mid-1959, against all advice but in line with the sense of mission felt by Nathan, husband and father. The story is told through the perspectives of his wife and three daughters, as the family endures tragedy and disaster, and each of them eventually settles their own terms with Africa and with each other. Nathan Price comes across as an absurdly unsympathetic character, sacrificing his family for his improbable mission, but each of the women gets a good bit of narrative to themselves. Not knowing the DRC, as it now is, I can’t speak to Kingsolver’s accuracy, but she seems to have done her research.

I was struck that a number of write-ups of the book seemed to think that it was about what the US did to Zaire (as it then was) and Africa, when in fact this is simply political backdrop, taken for granted, for the more human drama of the Price sisters and their mother. Having said that, of course the political circumstances shape the environment, and Nathan’s simplistic and disastrous attempts to bring Christianity to the natives are a direct parallel with the American fascinatiom with warding off Communism.

Anyway, a fascinating and thought-provoking read.

Somehow I never got hold of this lovely reference book on the first 20 years of Doctor Who when it was first published in 1983. Most of the material is of course familiar to me from many other sources, but there is a particularly nice piece by Barry Letts, who died only a few days ago. Lots of good illustrations too. Shame that Haining didn’t get any contribution from Philip Hinchcliffe or Robert Holmes, but the pieces by Terrance Dicks and John Nathan-Turner are also above average.

Enda Kenny, the leader of the opposition in Ireland, has been getting headlines for his pledge yesterday to abolish the upper house of the Irish parliament if he wins the next election (as seems increasingly inevitable).

He is right. Before I explain why, though, I thought it might be worthwhile to look at the other two parliamentary upper houses which have been inflicted on the twenty-six counties which now constitute the Republic of Ireland, and also at the reasons why they too were abolished.

The Senate of Southern Ireland, 1921

Most students of Irish history are aware of the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which elected two parliaments for the six counties of Northern Ireland and the twenty-six counties of “Southern Ireland”. Rather late in the day, Lord Oranmore and Browne inserted a clause giving both parliaments a senate, arguing that it was a necessary safeguard for the Protestant minority in the South (and rather as an afterthought throwing in a Senate for Northern Ireland too).

The Home Rule Act of 1912, passed eventually in 1914, would have provided a forty-member Senate, initially appointed by the Lord Lieutenant but later to be elected by the provinces of Ireland (each as a single multi-member electoral unit) in proportion to population. This would probably have given Protestants a disproportionate voice in the new Senate’s first term, later to be ironed out by popular elections, as indeed actually happened with the later Irish Free State Senate. The Irish Convention, an earnest but long-forgotten attempt to get an agreed settlement between Unionists and Nationalists in 1917, proposed a sixty-four member Senate, which would have included seven ecclesiastics, three Lord Mayors (Dublin, Cork and Belfast), fifteen peers, eleven direct nominees of the Lord Lieutenant, fifteen representatives of commerce and industry, and from each of the four provinces one representative of Labour and two from the county councils.

Lord Oranmore and Browne’s proposal for Southern Ireland adopted most of the Irish Convention’s concepts, mutatis mutandis for the new situation: it had the Lord Chancellor of Ireland as its chairman; fifteen peers of the realm, resident in Southern Ireland, elected by their peers; eight Privy Councillors, elected by Privy Councillors; two representatives of the Church of Ireland; two representatives of the Catholic Church; sixteen individuals nominated by the Lord Lieutenant, including two who were to be nominated after consultation with the Labour movement, which however declined to be involved; and seventeen elected by the members of the county councils in different territorial constituencies, for a total of 61 members. Nobody could be bothered to argue against it, and it passed into law and the elections/appointments were duly scheduled for May/June 1921.

I found the papers relating to the Southern Ireland Senate in the Irish National Archives many years ago. The Catholic Church and the labour movement refused to nominate their two representatives each, and the county councils, all controlled by Sinn Fein, likewise refused to participate, but the Southern Ireland Parliament came into being with 39 (who I listed here) senators plus the Lord Chancellor and four MPs (elected by Trinity College graduates in the University of Dublin constituency). They met a couple of times, (the summons being issued by a Dublin Castle official with the glorious title of Clerk of Crown and Hanaper), but were then dissolved as irrelevant. Most of those elected to the House of Commons of Southern Ireland constituted themselves as the Second Dáil.

The Senate of the Irish Free State (1921-1936)

The 1921 Treaty made no reference to an upper house in the parliament of the Irish Free State. But it was literally the first concession offered by Arthur Griffith to the Southern ex-Unionists the day the Treaty was signed. (Donal O’Sullivan’s superb if partisan The Irish Free State And Its Senate is essential reading on this.) The new Senate was to have 60 members, serving twelve-year terms, to be replaced 15 at a time (plus casual vacancies) by elections every three years in which the entire population over the age of 30 could vote. Of the initial 60 members of 1922, half were simply chosen by W.T. Cosgrave as the head of government (the President, to use the terminology of the day) and half elected by the members of the Dáil (necessarily excluding the Anti-Treaty TDs who were boycotting it). Cosgrave, as had been understood and anticipated, included sixteen former Unionists among his thirty nominees. (And also W.B. Yeats, who though not a Unionist came from that tradition.)

The first election in 1925 (to fill places for half of those chosen by the Dáil three years ealier, plus filling four casual vacancies) was a pretty farcical affair, as I have reported elsewhere. 76 candidates contested for 19 places; since the ruling party, Cumann na nGaedhael, had more than 19 candidates in the running it did not campaign, and the turnout was accordingly low everywhere. Nobody much minded the subsequent constitutional revision: the Senate was henceforth re-elected by thirds, rather than quarters, for nine-year terms, rather than twelve, and the voters were to be simply the members of the outgoing Senate and the Dáil.

This meant that the original purpose of the Senate, to give bonus representation to Protestants, essentially tapered off over the years. What it then became was a mechanism to deter radical policy innovation. The way it had been set up, combined with the early boycott by Anti-Treaty forces, meant that when Éamon de Valera finally came to power in 1932 (consolidated in the 1933 election) he had a popular mandate in the Dáil which however was subject to obstruction by the indirectly elected Senate. Obviously, he needed to abolish the upper chamber, and did so as rapidly as constitutionally possible (May 1936), as part of his general transition from the Irish Free State to the 1937 Constitution. In the course of the bitter political debate, De Valera claimed that “The more modern thinkers who are dealing with present day affairs and conditions are gradually coming to the conclusion that, when all is said and done, a Single Chamber Government is the wisest.”

Seanad Éireann (1938-??)

De Valera drew up the current Irish constitution in 1937 (in the name of the most holy trinity, of course) and actually included a provision for an upper house, despite his earlier statements of disinclination. His argument in favour of doing so was not altogether convincing:

the only thing that made me put a proposition for a Seanad into this measure at all is this: that there were members on the benches opposite, as I remember, who, during the Seanad debate, said: “Very well, even a bad Seanad would be better than no Seanad at all.” It is precisely on that basis—that some Seanad, the best Seanad we can get, even though it may be adjudged a bad Seanad, is still better than no Seanad at all—that this proposal is now included. My attitude is that, even though some of us may be largely indifferent to the question of whether or not there is a Seanad, if a large section of the people of the country think that there is something important in having a Seanad, then, even if we ourselves are indifferent to it, we should give way to the people who are anxious for it.

This is hardly a ringing endorsement of bicameralism. Anyway, the system Dev established has survived unchanged to the present day.

Of the 60 senators, 43 are elected on various panels, supposedly as experts in / representatives of i) Public administration and social services, ii) Agriculture and fisheries, iii) Education, the arts, the Irish language and Irish culture and literature, iv) Industry and commerce and v) Labour. The electorate for these 43 seats consists of all local government councillors, TDs and outgoing senators. Rather than being actual experts in their field, therefore, the 43 senators elected this way tend to reflect the politics of the state as a whole; politicians will always tend to vote for other politicians. I don’t think that De Valera was under much illusion about this, but it was a sop to Catholic social theorists and could be argued as having roots in Pius XI’s Quadreagesimo Anno.

3 senators are elected by graduates of Trinity College Dublin and another 3 by graduates of the National University of Ireland. In the Irish Free State period, they had had the same representation in the Dáil, but this was abolished again at a fairly early stage by Dev. A constitutional amendment in 1979 created the possibility of including graduates of other institutions in this mix but it has never been implemented. NB that university graduates elected members of the House of Commons at Westminster until 1950, and of Stormont until 1968.

The remaining 11 Senators, in an odd cut-and-paste from the 1917 Irish Convention proposals, are nominated directly by the Taoiseach of the day. This normally rewards ruling party stalwarts who didn’t make it to either chamber by other means; recently an expectation has developed that the Taoiseach should include the occasional person from Northern Ireland on the list as well.

Why Enda Kenny is right

As I wrote recently, I share Dev’s 1934 scepticism on the utility of upper chambers in general, particularly when your state has no pretensions to federalism, and particularly if your population is already pretty small. Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus (both parts, under current arrangements, though this is likely to change in the event of a federal settlement), Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden , Turkey and Ukraine all manage perfectly well as unicameral states. Indeed, Sweden (in 1970) and Croatia (in 2001) actually abolished their upper chambers as part of a programme of democratisation. Both have larger populations than Ireland. (NB that the Croatian Sabor has fewer seats than the Dáil for much the same population.)

One can make claims in favour of the Seanad: that it is needed as a revising chamber (in a stronger form, that it is a democratic safeguard against the Dáil), or that it offers a platform to interests who otherwise would not get parliamentary representation. These arguments are weak. Most sensible parliaments deal with the needs for a decent revision of legislation by establishing a proper committee structure, adequately serviced by an independent parliamentary research division. As for the idea that the Seanad can be a democratic safeguard, in its seventy-two years of history, the Seanad has rejected precisely one government legislative proposal, as far as I know; this was De Valera’s attempt to abolish proportional representation in 1959. It did not matter, as the Dáil over-ruled the Seanad (and then the people, in the subsequent referendum, over-ruled the Dáil). That is not a tremendous track record for a revising chamber.

As for the notion that it represents the unrepresented, this is essentially in support of 1) the independent members elected from the universities, such as Mary Robinson, David Norris, etc; and 2) the occasional imaginative use of patronage by successive Taoisigh choosing their eleven nominees. Neither of these cases is convincing. While I have huge respect for both Robinson and Norris, their most significant contributions to modernising Ireland were made outside Leinster House, through the courts; and it is not as if articulate university graduates are exactly an oppressed group in today’s Ireland. And if we are to admire the occasional interesting nominee among the Taoiseach’s party hacks, we surely cannot admire the total absence of any democratic scrutiny in that process.

The one valid objection to Enda Kenny’s proposal is that he is making it out of sheer populism rather than after any mature reflection on the outcome. I can’t see into his mind so I don’t know if that is true, but it’s pretty clear that he is appealing to (his opponents would say pandering to) the massive wave of anti-system frustration in Irish politics at present. (For those of you who haven’t been following these things, the Ceann Comhairle – the Speaker of the Dáil – was forced out of office last week after publicity about his excessive expense claimsthe government proposes to pump massive amounts of public money into failing banks17,000 public service jobs are to be cut along with cuts to social welfare payments). It’s fair to say that the existence of the Seanad has little to do with the problems facing the country, but that doesn’t make its abolition a bad idea either.

I have only a handful of books left to read of those I marked as “unread” when I joined Librarything in late 2005, so I have decided to start working through those I had already read before then but hadn’t reviewed on-lline. There are a couple of thousand of them, so this is not a project I seriously intend to complete any time soon. The ordering is rather randomly determined by whatever happened to be on the shelves as I got around to cataloguing four years ago, so I’m starting with a run of Hartwell anthologies. (And a guidebook to Paris, if I can find it.)

This pulls together Hartwell’s selection of the best stories of 2000. As you would expect, they are all good: the standouts for me are David Langford’s “Different Kinds of Darkness”, from his series of BLIT stories, this one set in a boarding school for specially talented children; Greg Egan’s “Oracle”, which has an alternate-universe take on the possible interactions between C.S. Lewis and Alan Turing; and Teg Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters”, which combines steampunk and qabalah.

It is interesting to compare Hartwell’s choices with those of the Hugo and Nebula voters that year. “Different Kinds of Darkness” won the Hugo for Best Short Story (deservedly and decisively; the other nominees were all terrible). “Oracle” and “Seventy-Two Letters” were both on the Hugo shortlist for Best Novella, but were beaten by Jack Williamson’s “The Ultimate Earth”, which is not as good a story as either but was obviously the last chance to give an award to the nonagenarian author (it won the Nebula too, I guess for the same reason). None of Hartwell’s selections made it to the Nebula shortlist, or even the preliminary ballot, for either year of eligibility. Draw your own conclusions…

I never got around to writing up the second series of Sarah Jane Adventures properly – in summary, I loved the one where Maria and her father came back, thought the one with Sarah Jane’s parents had too much cut and paste from other New Who and SJA stories, and was surprised that the Brigadier’s return in the last story did not really grab me – but the third series is off to a good start. Of course it’s on while I am at work during the week, but I think I will find ways (cough, cough) of catching up at the weekends.

Prisoner of the Judoon is surprisingly subversive for a children’s show. The Judoon are authority figures whose authority stems as much from fear as from the Shadow Proclamation, and who behave quite unreasonably – their deference to regulation as much as their inclination for summary execution (and tendency to get deflected from it as well). Meanwhile the Androvax, while definitely a genocidal villain, is given a realistic motivation which comes close to being a sympathetic treatment. Not all policemen are your friends, children; not all bad people are irredeemable.

On the series format as a whole, we are heading in the dirction of the Clyde Langer adventures, which I think recognises Daniel Anthony’s talents. Elisabeth Sladen did not sound totally at ease doing the series intro. However, she clearly had a ball being the Androvax in Sarah’s body – much more exciting than being possessed by spiders, Mandragora or Eldrad. And the fun plotline in this series is obviously going to be letting Rani’s parents in on the secret of alien activity and their daughter’s involvement in it.

• reading_gibbon: Chapter VII: The Year of Six Emperors, and Philip the Arab
  On the younger Gordian:
  Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.
  (tags: gibbon)

• Tove Jansson’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations
  Thanks to communicator
  (tags: sf)

…here is a video of every jelly baby moment from Doctor Who. (With added Brahms, for some reason.)

My reading rate has fallen off this month, partly because I have had some excellent listening on my commute.

I’m baffled by the critism of The Hornet’s Nest from some online commentators. Of course it’s not like a Big Finish audio play, this is because it isn’t a Big Finish audio play. Of course it’s not like a Fourth Doctor television story, but it isn’t a television story. I admit that Tom Baker is playing Tom Baker even more obviously than he did on screen in the 1970s; it’s also true that this is the Doctor presented as earthbound paranormal investigator rather than traveller through all of space and time; but it seems to me entirely within the range of the Doctor we know (especially as supplemented by Baker’s performance of himself as late). It’s not blow-me-away brilliant, but very entertaining.

The Robots of Death was one of the best Fourth Doctor stories, and its writer Chris Boucher brought the Doctor and Leela back to the same planet in his novel Corpse Marker. Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore, who had already gained my respect for their activites as critics, together with Boucher and others, generated seven audio plays based around the interactions between Commander Uvanov (now running the planet) and the mysterious Kaston Iago (played by Paul “Avon” Darrow, though I think they are different characters), fighting off the cultists of Taren Capel and also facing up to another Fourth Doctor era monster. The first five plays form a pretty decent story arc, of which the first is unfortunately the weakest, but the others all enjoyable. As well as Darrow, Russell Hunter reprises Uvanov and other characters are played by Peter “Nyder” Miles and Peter “Zen” Tuddenham. The sixth play, “The Prisoner”, is a much shorter face-off between Darrow and Miles, in their characters from Kaldor City but effectively as Number Six and Number Two, very nicely done. The last of the plays, actually set on a storm miner, is rather detached from the others and can be skipped (though you will probably want to listen to it anyway).

I have also been listening to the ongoing series of Bernice Summerfield audios from Big Finish, though I have not been writing them up as I go (likewise the Dalek Empire and Cyberman series). There was a sequence of three particularly good ones in the middle of Season Seven, however, which I wanted to note here: Timeless Passages, by Daniel O’Mahony, which involves a time-shifting library; The Worst Thing In The World, by Dave Stone, which is set on a Hollywood-like planet where different genres of entertainment are getting lethally entangled; and Summer of Love, by Simon Guerrier, in which the entire population of the Braxiatel collection appears to have become sex-mad. All very entertaining.

There is of course only one science fiction audio play that anyone has ever heard of, and that is Orson Welles’ 1938 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. I was delighted to find it downloadable from here. Anyone with the slightest interest in Wells, Welles or audio sf plays needs to hear it. It is only loosely based on the original novel; the brilliant introduction is retained, but then we are into light music interrupted by increasingly desperate news bulletins and horrible events, culminating with Times Square and the rest of New York succumbing to poison gas. That takes us to the 40-minute mark, at which point we are reminded that this is a work of fiction; and then the last third is essentially a post-holocaust survival story, Welles’ Martians having been much more thorough in their devastation than Wells’ originals. And at the very end, Welles himself steps out of character to remind everyone that it is Halloween. The discerning listener will have had no difficulty working out that it was fictional even if they tuned in after the first two minutes, but of course not every listener has the time to be discerning; my own adopted country was convulsed for days after a deliberate media hoax three years ago, so I can believe both that there was a significant public reaction to Welles’ broadcast, and also that it makes an even better story if exaggerated. Anyway, it’s essential material for any sf enthusiast.

• David Miliband for EU High Rep? | Charlemagne's notebook | Economist.com
  My own comment – this is not the first I have heard of this rumour; we should take it seriously.
  (tags: eu)
• doctorwho: Clutching at Christmassy Straws.
  Why Eight is not canon (old post)
  (tags: doctorwho)

I had been warned that this novel of parallel plots between 1209 and 2005 was pretty dire, but it is vastly superior to The Da Vinci Code, and will appeal to the same sort of reader. I found it a bit dull in places and implausible – these fictional conspiracies always tend to have perfect knowledge of their situation apart from the One Thing our heroes can tell them – but there’s a nice sense of the scenery of southern France.

I had logged the book as Not Fantasy before reading it, but in fact in the last couple of chapters it turns out that one of the 2005 characters has lived the whole way through from the thirteenth century, and the cave where the story started is collapsed by supernatural means, so I think in the end it is on the sff side of the boundary (certainly more securely so than Cryptonomicon).

In the hospital to get my various vaccinations for Southern Sudan, I spotted a familiar couple in the waiting room – one of the International Crisis Group’s board members and his wife, like me getting jabs for a forthcoming Africa trip. This would be Mark Eyskens and his wife Anne, he being a short, jovial viscount and former prime minister of Belgium (his father Gaston was prime minister off and on between 1949 and 1973, Mark followed for a few months in 1981 in which his major achievement was lowering the voting age from 21 to 18). He posts his somewhat surreal paintings of Leuven town hall, and other ramblings and deep thoughts, on his website, rather as the current prime minister posts haiku on his. We had a nice chat about Africa, and will see each other again later this evening at a reception. It can be a small world sometimes.

• The Millions: The More They Stay the Same: William Manchesterâ™s The Death of a President
  Fascinating review of an even more fascinating article on Manchester's book about what happened in Dallas on 22 November 1963
  (tags: history)

I’ve been reading at a less voracious pace this month – combination of better health, less travel, more useful occupation at the weekends, and some rather good audios to listen to on the commute (which I will write up in due course). Anyway, this is a short (190 page) but glossy book on seven plants and their impact on human history, especially colonialism: tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, tea, the opium poppy, chinchona (the source of quinine) and rubber. I wasn’t hugely satisfied: I can think of other significant plants (the spices, coffee and cacao, flax and sisal, the coconut/copra) whose trade has affected and continues to affect the world economy. I found numerous irritating trivial mistakes (one that I will treasure refers to the British occupation of “Cypress” rather than Cyprus). The major reference cited is J.M. Roberts’ Penguin History of the World. There are too many sidebar blocks of text which could have been better incorporated into the main narrative. It could perhaps be a nice jumping-off point for further reading but didn’t satisfy me.

I have a mega-trip coming up at the start of next month.

For the first week of November I shall be on mission in Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan. I have never visited any part of Africa before, and would very much welcome tips from those who have been there (looking especially at , who I trust will be discreet about this).

A rather punishing flight schedule then deposits me in New York for a prolonged staff meeting starting on the 8th. I believe that my evenings are fairly free – I’m wondering about organising a pub-meet or dinner with LJ friends and other in New York, probably on the 9th or 10th – any interest?

(This post friends-locked to deter potential burglars and agents of Khartoum.)

• mraltariel: Hooray!
  Recipes
  (tags: cooking)