One of those classics which I’d never quite got around to reading. It tends to get claimed as sf because it is set in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic nuclear war (in 1961, started by Albania nuking Naples believe it or not). But in fact it is a very middle-class story about people dying: facing up to their inevitable death from radiation poisoning, as the deadly dust gradually makes its way south to Melbourne. (Would be interested to hear from John Wyndham experts if they consider this as a “cosy catastrophe” novel.)

Many years ago I had read what was purportedly a slightly risqué extract from this novel (about a woman “risking her assets” by cooking stir fries while topless). I am disappointed to report that there is no such passage in the book.

And knowing Shute as I now do, that’s not very surprising. There is dignity and decency here rather than passion. The love affair which partly drives the narrative is determinedly not consummated; one of its protagonists, the last American military commander on earth, decides not to poison himself as the others all do, but to go down with his ship. In places the narrative voice is so sparse that it is skeletal. It is almost a novel without suspense, since there is no mystery about whether or not the characters will survive.

But in the end, the theme of encroaching death is one that we all have to deal with individually sooner or later. Shute is one of the rare writers to have applied it to a whole group of people – the last of humanity – and carried out the thought experiment as to how people like him (and I suppose people rather like me) would react. And the end comes with a dramatic understatedness, true to the epigraph from T.S. Eliot (which supplies also the eponymous beach):

    In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river …

    This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

A slightly odd Who novel, a bit out of joint with itself: the Fourth Doctor, travelling companionless, meets with Nyssa, years after she has left Terminus, and sets off to track down a time anomaly centred around Roger Bacon in the year 1278. Darvill-Evans (who of course was Rebecca Levene’s boss at Virgin when they were publishing the New and Missing Adventures) has worked hard, perhaps a little too hard, at the medieval Oxford setting, and explains how and why in an interesting afterword to the book. It is a very good study of Nyssa as tragic heroine, a line taken also in a couple of the better Big Finish audios; the Doctor / Bacon exchanges are quite fun as well. But the plot is a thin compilation of Brother Cadfael and Inspector Morse, with a pinch of alien menace not very satisfactorily explained. Still, an interestingly different take on where a Who novel can go and a moderate success.

An excellent merging of numerous MacLeod themes, shaken and stirred to produce a thought-provoking result. The book is set in a relatively near-future independent Scotland, after the victory of secularism against religion throughout the English-speaking world, but is nothing like as polemical as that summary might make it sound; it is told from the point of view of the policeman investigating the murder of a Catholic priest, a crime which leads him into the underground world of the surviving Christian churches and the existential and political problems of intelligent robots, built for a war which is now over. (In general, I hate cute anthromorphic robots, but these are not cute and only optionally anthroporphic, and I was entirely satisfied by their psychology.) I wished the ending had been unpacked a bit, but I also know that MacLeod sometimes expects a bit of brain-work from his readers.

Although this is a stand-alone book, and so is MacLeod’s forthcoming The Restoration Game, astute readers will note that both feature U.S. intelligence, computer games, and New Zealand, though to differing extents.

Another classic reread for me. It is as good as I remembered; I had forgotten just how much of the book is the set-up for the trial scene, which is actually only a fairly short chapter. It is a brilliant and brutal depiction of childhood in rural Alabama in the 1930s, when your father is the town’s most visible liberal, and of the murder of a black man by racism.

I am bothered, though, about the complacency of the ending. Actually, Atticus Finch’s morality suffers a serious defeat. Boo Radley is spared his day in court, for a crime which he committed but would certainly have been acquitted of; totally the opposite fate to Tom Robinson’s. Yet I am left uncomfortably feeling that we are expected to consider this a happy ending. And what of the Ewell family, now fatherless and denied justice as they denied it to the Robinsons? Nobody wins, and I think the last chapter needed a bit more edge to be true to the rest of the book.

Trying to find a good way of getting online while in the UK this month, the nice people at PC World talked me into taking the cheap offer of an O2 pay-and-go dongle.

Turns out that it won’t actually let me pay; O2 doesn’t accept payments from non-UK credit cards, not even over the phone. (Which sort of kills the idea of credit cards in the first place, no? But never mind.)

Is this going to be a general problem if I try and get mobile broadband while in the country?

I was vaguely aware that comedian Toby Hadoke has a one-man stage show about being a Doctor Who fan, and got hold of the CD in the expectation of some wry nostalgic giggles but not much more.

I got a great deal more. The CD adaptation includes various other actors (including Louise Jameson as Hadoke’s mother and Colin Baker as himself), adding to the power of the script, which is a wonderful meditation on growing up as an outsider and then coming to terms with fatherhood, with Doctor Who as a backdrop. (Basically everything that Nick Davies’ Dalek I Loved You was trying to be, and much else besides.)

I was glad that I listened to this on one of the rare days when I had driven to work. I could not stop crying at the end, and that is better done in the privacy of one’s own car rather than in a commuter train. It is brilliant.

AP piece about my work – would be interested to know if it is in the print as well as the on-line version of the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/07/31/world/AP-EU-Diplomats-for-Hire.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=independent%20diplomat&st=cse

Grateful to hear of other print sightings – I see that Huffington Post and Salon have both picked it up online.

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Non-fiction: 10 (YTD 55)
         

Fiction (non-sf): 4 (YTD 32)
   

SF (non-Who): 7 (YTD 48)
      

Doctor Who and Torchwood: 11 (YTD 27)
          

Comics: 2 (YTD 18)
 

8 (YTD 42/199) by women (Scroggins, Lawrence, Kingston, Hopkinson/Mehan, 4 x Rayner)
2 (YTD 11/199) by PoC (Kingston, Hopkinson/Mehan)
Total page count ~8,500 (YTD 56,600)
Owned for more than a year: 5 (The Hobbit [reread], Misspent Youth, The Lost Heart of Asia [reread], So Long Been Dreaming, Chronicle in Stone)
Also reread: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (YTD 23)

This book is essential reading, not just for the Doctor Who fan, but for anyone who is even slightly interested in the show, or more broadly who is interested in the process of writing for television.

It is structured as a year-long email conversation between journalist Benjamin Cook and Russell T Davies about the process of writing the fourth season of New Who, from Voyage of the Damned to Journey’s End. (Also briefly including Time Crash.) On the scale of loving or hating RTD, I am sort of in the middle: I respect and admire his achievement in reviving Who in the first place, which I think in the end puts me just slightly on the “love” side of the divide, but I don’t always like his writing, or his public persona. This book reinforced both my positive and negative prejudices about him as a professional, but it grounded them in a much deeper understanding of his personality, and in the awful responsibility of the writer on a show like Who: his loyalty and his guilt circulate around his key colleagues – Julie Gardner, Phil Collinson, David Tennant – and worrying that he won’t produce the goods with adequate quality or promptness.

Vast amounts of draft script are included in the book, much of which made it to screen. I found the roads not taken rather interesting – who was the comedienne who might have played Penny, the companion who never was because Catherine Tate accepted the invitation to return? Imagine if Dennis Hopper had been available? And at the very end of the book, Cook rightly persuades Davies to drop a really awful linking script between Journey’s End and The Next Doctor.

But even more interesting is to see what the fundamental idea of each story actually is. They are not always very strong. The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End is almost entirely about showing rather than telling:

…Daleks, en masse. Lots of gunfire and exterminations. And the biggest Dalek spaceship ever – more like a Dalek temple. Christ almighty! The skies over the Earth need to be changed to weird outer space vistas. Also, visible in the sky, a huge Dalek ship exterior. The size of a solar system! This will probably explode. Like they do.

And Davros.

So the episodes are seen at this point largely as spectacle rather than story; the most effective bit, the end of Donna’s travels with the Doctor, emerges rather late in the day from Davies’ fevered imagination. One may not always like the solutions he comes up with, but the insight into the creative process. Is utterly fascinating and compelling.

(Certain sections of fandom will not be pleased by what he has to say about the internet. Too bad. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman on George R.R. Martin, Russell T Davies is not your bitch.)

There is a surprising amount of death in the book: Christopher Ecclestone’s driver, David Tennant’s mother, Verity Lambert, and most of all Howard Attfield, called from his sick bed to reprise his role as Donna’s father, but unable to complete the scripts. After his death, his scenes are reshot with Bernard Cribbins. The show must go on.

Indeed, that is the bigger lesson from the. Book. If Doctor Who is sometimes less than perfect, it happens basically because The Show Must Go On, and because the writers and producers have determined to put on screen what they can. It is rather amazing that it ended up so well as often as it did.

Anyway, this is probably the most interesting book about Doctor Who that will ever be written. If you are even slightly interested in the subject, get it.

This has been on my to-read list for a while. I read Carlyle’s 1849 translation of Inferno many years ago, but this is the 1814 blank verse version by H.F. Cary, in a bargain edition which also includes Doré’s famous engravings of five decades later. Unfortunately it has no footnotes at all, and I think I will need to get another version with more explanatory matter; too much of the text simply sailed over my head.

It is none the less a tremendous literary achievement – to merge Judeo-Christian and classical mythologies, and recent (for 1300) European history, into a fairly seamless world; to construct mappable spaces of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven; and to come out of all this with a reasoned but impassioned emphasis on Love as the driving force behind God and the universe – all these are remarkable things.

I can see why Inferno is the most popular of the three – evil is always more interesting than good or repentance. Oddly enough, though, the one moment when the narrative really grabbed me was towards the end of Purgatorio, when Virgil hands over the role of guide to Beatrice. I don’t know if this is a general finding, or something to do with the translation, or just the mood I was in at the time.

Anyway, I now have a good sense of the overall shape of the story, and will look out for an edition which gives me more explanation of the details.

I now know how I will fill the Who-less weeks of November…

(Isn’t McKellen fantastic?)

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An old favourite, of course; but it must be a very long time since last I read it. I anticipated correctly that the lack of female characters would now seem an obvious gap; I had forgotten that there were so many sapient animals – the wolves, the birds, Beorn’s friends. It is well-paced, and generally fair to the reader. I was surprised by how little page space Smaug gets.

Bilbo is a much more interesting character than I had remembered. His moments of heroism are not through violence but through moral strength: in particular, his attempts to prevent the Elves and Dwarves from fighting. That said, the Gollum business and the Arkenstone incident both show certain ambiguities in his heroism.

Gandalf, somewhat to my surprise, comes over as an arch-manipulator. He pulls Bilbo onto the adventure very much against his will, and the battle with Smaug and then the Goblins is almost a proxy conflict for the ongoing Cold War against Sauron/the Necromancer, the point being to consolidate the northeastern corner of the map. But it looks rather like the Battle of the Five Armies is a deliberate rehearsal for the War of the Ring, orchestrated by Gandalf.

I’ve been reading the edition with Tolkien’s own sketches. Let’s be honest: they are not very good – studies of perspective, really, with the humanoid figures barely recognisable as such. The trolls in the picture hide behind the trees, in clear contradiction to the text. Providing the author’s own drawings gives some extra authenticity, but I think they could have been saved for one of the spinoff volumes.

• Teatime Brutality: Canon
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We lucky subscribers to Doctor Who Monthly get to download this for free from Big Finish’s website: a new Companion Chronicle, filling the gap I guess between the third and fourth seasons of the regular BF releases, starring Katy Manning as Jo Grant: The Mists of Time, by Jonathan Morris. It’s quite a decent story – not up to Morris’s impressive best, but exploits both the audio format, and Manning’s ability to mimic both her own younger self and also Pertwee and the other characters, rather well.(And a second actor, Andrew Whipp, is an incidental future archaeologist whose importance to proceedings only gradually emerges.) The ending was signalled a little too far in advance for my taste, and I didn’t quite buy the Awful Secret of the Time Lords, but I imagine Big Finish will get a few more subscriptions out of this one. (See also Morris’s own notes on producing the play.)

The first of the non-printed series of Torchwood audio books, by Stephen Savile and read by Naoko “Tosh” Mori, set before the end of Series 1, so with a full five-member team. I am getting into these, I must say, having enjoyed The Sin Eaters earlier in the month: Naoko Mori has a quiet voice, but is intense when she needs to be, and also is good at doing the others’ accents without sounding like she is taking the piss. The story is a decent variation from the Torchwood standard, with seventeenth-century alchemy and modern genetic research combining to make a respectably sfnal plot, with also plenty of good character moments (Jack and Gwen, ironically enough, getting fewest of these). Anyway, brightened up a few days’ commute; I shall look out for more of these (esp as my reservoir of unheard Big Finish plays is running very dry).

Bought a book on eBay. The seller sent me the wrong one. Now they refuse to send the right one unless I send the other one back first. (Though they say they will refund postage.) Advice?

Harry Towb, a Northern Irish actor who made it moderately big on the British stage and screen, died at the weekend (a few days before his 84th birthday), and I just wanted to acknowledge his two roles in Doctor Who – as Osgood, the lunar controller in episode 1 of The Seeds of Death and McDermott, the old-school plastics factory man in episode 2 of Terror of the Autons. In both cases he gets kiilled off pretty early on, but rather memorably so. Osgood has a fairly standard English accent, but McDermott is the only character ever to appear on Doctor Who sounding like he shares Towb’s Norn Iron origins.

The Seeds of Death

Osgood bids his farewell as he heads up to the moon…

…disappearing in the T-Mat booth…

…to find that his management problems…

…have been made worse by…

…the unseen intruders…

…(actually the Ice Warriors)…

…who shoot him. And he dies.

Terror of the Autons

McDermott is puzzled by the plastics factory…

…and the new advisor with the natty beard…

…who wants to show him a new invention…

…the chair you can just sink into…

…this is the forerunner of the bin that eats Mickey in "Rose"…

…and so McDermott dies.

Towb also returned rather bizarrely to play the Brigadier’s aged Italian Uncle in The Ghosts of N-Space, Jon Pertwee’s last outing as the Doctor, in 1996. There are no pictures from The Ghosts of N-Space, but perhaps that is just as well.

Samuel Pepys is at war. Or rather, England is at war with the Dutch; and Samuel Pepys, as senior administrator with the Navy Board, is deeply engaged with it. Last month, in a prolonged battle fought from 1 to 4 June 1666, the British were defeated, though not decisively.

In last night’s diary entry, Pepys tells how he had drafted a new paper on victualling the fleet, and was waiting for the King to come out of chapel to show it to him, when there came “people out of the Parke, telling us that the guns are heard plain. And so every body to the Parke, and by and by the chappell done, and the King and Duke into the bowling-green, and upon the leads [the roof], whither I went, and there the guns were plain to be heard.”

Once again, battle is raging at sea, and the government have no idea how it is going. Pepys hangs around court as long as seems practical (getting some of the King’s food and drink – the latter actually cooled with ice, an unthinkable luxury). But the working day is disrupted beyond repair.

So Pepys checks in with three of his lovers, and ends up going home with his wife. (Who was “twatling” at Lady Penn’s. Whatever that means.)

For future developments, check .

Thanks to for pointing the way out of my earlier dilemma, especially given that she has better things to do. I sent my friend more or less the message she suggested, and he replied with good grace, explaining that he was “trying to poke our fusty old Americans back with provincialisms and see if we can shake people out of it.” Well, good luck to him if that is his aim; I suspect this particular route may not work.

In the unlikely case that you didn’t catch my ZDF interview from early June and still want to see it, I have uploaded my two-minute segment as a 45 MB .wmv file to http://www.megaupload.com/?d=5QC96YER – it is from a longer programme called “Die EU von A bis Z”, “The EU from A to Z” and my bit is “D for Diplomats (for hire)”. If you don’t have a MegaUpload account it will demand that you type in three letters to prove you are human before allowing you to access the file..

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A graphic novel sequel to The Prisoner, published 20 years later. The Village has been closed for years, but a former Number Two exposes many of its secrets in a Spycatcher-like memoir. Meanwhile Alice Drake, an agent on a sailing holiday from a failing marriage, gets shipwrecked in this place with very weird architecture….

I generally liked Shattered Visage. It is very true to the original TV series visually and psychologically; the characters are beautifully drawn and entirely recognisable. I was a bit disappointed with the ending which felt both rushed and inconclusive. But basically this is a worthy addition to Prisoner canon.

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A friend of mine has written a short book about international politics, and sent it to me to ask if I would give him a quote for the blurb. I accepted with some interest – I know my friend really as an activist and was intrigued to discover what he is like as a writer.

Oh dear.

The book is really terrible. There is an offensive joke about Mexicans on the very first page, and it goes on from there. It is meant, I think (I hope) as ironic mockery of white American attitudes towards the rest of the world, but the irony is not very obvious.

Well, giving him a positive quote for the dust jacket simply isn’t an option. I am pondering whether to send a negative quote and daring him to use it, but that carries the risk that he will actually do so. No, I do not want my name on this appalling book.

So, the options are either write to him now and say that I cannot provide him with what he wants, or leave it in the hope that he forgets. (He has a big network, so I am certainly not the only person he has approached.) My energy levels today will determine which course of action I take.

I was a bit surprised when my morning meditation announced to me that today is the feast day of St Bridget. Back in Ireland, the euhemerised deity is commemorated on 1 February.

When our eldest was a few months old, a chance conversation about names with (which I’m sure she has completely forgotten) alerted me to the existence of St Bridget of Sweden, who it turns out died on this date in 1373, and so is commemorated today.

The Swedish version seems to me not a bad role model to have: true to her own (admittedly somewhat peculiar) visions, moved to Rome in order to put more effective pressure on the Pope to raise the moral tone of the age; something of an activist who would not take no for an answer. I once ended up staying near the church she founded in Rome, though apparently she herself now rests back home in Sweden.

K, an old friend, got back in touch after a few years yesterday, and while composing my reply to him I googled him and his wife, E, to see what they have been up to recently.

I discovered that they had had a bizarre and unpleasant experience a couple of years ago at the hands of a blogging advice columnist. It seems that E was on the phone to her optician in New York while sitting in a cafe in California, and talking too loudly for her neighbour’s taste. The blogging advice columnist, rather than saying this directly to E, wrote up the incident in a blog entry including E’s full name and phone number, suggesting that readers might like to call her and ask how the new glasses are going. The blog entry, published on a slow news day, got picked up by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

This is Not Cool. E made an unconscious mistake, quite possibly with mitigating circumstances of which the advice blogger is unaware (and indeed with one mitigating circumstance – not wanting to leave a small child on her own – which is obvious even from the advice blogger’s account). But the lesson the advice blogger gives us is not “don’t talk loudly on your mobile phone in cafes” but “it’s cool to publish the names and phone numbers of total strangers and urge others to mock them”.

You might have thought that rule #1 for any advice columnist would be that two wrongs don’t make a right. Obviously not.