It’s often a bit worrying to return to the scene of one’s youthful enthusiasm to see if the magic is still there – particularly in the case of this novel, bearing in mind the recent discussions of cultural appropriation.

It still worked for me. Zelazny’s writing in the first place is vigorous and powerful, and funny also on occasion; it is rather easy to get swept along by the characters with superhuman, semi-divine abilities trying to outwit each other without concentrating too much on the plot. His trademark was always the juxtaposition of the mythic and the demotic, and Lord of Light probably is the peak of his powers at novel length.

The plot also stands the test of time. The rulers of the world of Lord of Light have chosen to construct a religion in order to stay in power, and rather than make up their own (as later Zelazny books do) have taken Hinduism off the shelf, as it were, suited as it is to their reincarnation technology. “Accelerationism” (ie modernisation) among the general populace is ruthlessly repressed. Our hero, Sam, is one of the privileged who rebels, and uses methods of terrorism, war and assassination to undermine the power structures, is captured, executed twice, and eventually returned to life (at the start of the book, most of the story being told in flashback) and victory.

It’s not terribly clear that Sam is doing this out of an egalitarian or libertarian commitment to oppose tyranny; it seems more that he (along with Zelazny) favours two different types of enlightenment – personal enlightenment in the (explicitly) Buddhist sense, and cultural enlightenment in the sense of eighteenth-century Europe, in both cases implying freedom from religious dogma and control, and so is committed to bringing them about.

To achieve this, he has to do a deal with the indigenous entities of the planet as well, now known as the Rakashas; he exploits them but also possibly liberates them, and their support is crucial to his ultimate success – a subplot with interesting undertones both historically and psychologically. Note also that the explicitly Christian characters are dubious outsiders who are minor but somewhat unreliable allies (leading an army of soulless zombies). Plenty of cultural irony, directed mainly westwards.

Lord of Light won the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Other shorlisted books that year were The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany, and three books I haven’t read: Chthon by Piers Anthony, The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson and Thorns by Robert Silverberg. All except the Anderson book (of which I have otherwise not heard) were also shortlisted for the Nebula, which was won by The Einstein Intersection.

Ask me my Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn’t matter what, really! And I will answer them all in a new post. Possibly with pictures. If I can.

In the course of Wii workouts and solo shopping trips I have got through several audio books (and will do more before I am finished). None of these particularly special, the best probably being Mark Michalowski’s Shining Darkness.

August Books 16) The Nemonite Invasion, by David Rodan

An audiobook original, read effectively by Catherine Tate. Standard stuff – earth threatened by ‘orrible aliens, Donna gets a brief romance, base under siege; what drags it down, unfortunately, is that the base under siege is Dover immediately before Dunkirk, and my suspicion of disbelief is rather shattered by the idea that an alien assault and massive loss of personnel would not disrupt the intricate planning of such a key operation. If you do a historical story for laughs, make sure it is funny; if you do it didactically, as is the point here, you need more verisimilitude than this.

August Books 17) The Rising Night, by Scott Handcock

Another audio original, read well by Michelle Ryan, with a very similar plot concept to The Nemonite Invasion – ‘orrible alien incursions in historick England, in this case 18th-century Yorkshire. The Doctor, post-Donna, pitches up in a village covered by darkness where the people are turning into zombies. The problem I had was that the villagers seemed rather unconvincing – the Lady Christina-equivalent able to browbeat them despite being in her early twenties and not obviously a toff (apart from accent). I was also rather unconvinced by the ending which felt like the author was trying to imitate RTD rather than finding his own voice.

August Books 18) Shining Darkness, by Lance Parkin

An abbreviated audio adaptation of Michalowski’s Ten/Donna novel, read convincingly by Debbie Chazen. The only one of these four not set on Earth. A complex but fun romp of robots, art theft and space stations, and even though I usually hate cute anthropomorphic robots (and one of these is really annoyingly cute) I was prepared to cut a little slack, and enjoyed it.

August Books 19) The Art of Destruction, by Stephen Cole

For variety I read this one in dead tree form. The Doctor and Rose land in 22nd-century Chad where they find themselves caught up in the climax of a long-running alien war. The alien bits were rather good: I wasn’t so convinced that Cole was on top of the human material, and his Chad could almost as easily have been Belgium, apart from a couple of mentions of the temperature. Perhaps I am too demanding in wanting plenty of background detail and having it accurate too, but this is the first time I have not really been satisfied with a Stephen Cole novel.

I had problems with the three books set on Earth because of various aspects of the setting, which somewhat reinforces my feeling that the RTD policy of attaching the series relatively firmly to Earth hasn’t really been a strength. Perhaps things will change under the new regime.

Having read the climactic eleventh volume before the Hugos, I have been catching up with the volumes in between.

August Books 13) Fables vol 6: Homelands, by Bill Willingham

Again a decent romp, mostly about Litte Boy Blue’s solo raid deep into the Adversary’s domain, with the final revelation of who the Adversary actually is.

August Books 14) Fables vol 7: Arabian Nights (and Days), by Bill Willingham

had warned me, and he was right: the series goes seriously off the rails here, with some very dodgy Arab stereotyping, dubious references to the Iraq invasion, and a plot twist that is not very credibile even in the context of the series (“I changed the words that came out of his mouth, even though I don’t speak his language”). I got it for completeness but I think it can be skipped.

August Books 15) Fables vol 8: Wolves, by Bill Willingham

This was not so bad, though again I found the politics rather dodgy and it seems to be getting easier and easier to penetrate the Adversary’s domain. Lots of quite good character moments, rather stalling on plot. Also rather thin – only four issues of the comic here, bulked out by maps and the script for one of the issues.

So I’ll probably stick with these, but the earlier volumes were better.

Best Novel: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Anathem was runner-up for first place (by 477 to 357), but was also overtaken by Little Brother for second place. Saturn’s Children fourth, Zoe’s Tale fifth. Books which didn’t quite make the cut: Matter by Iain M. Banks and Nation by Terry Pratchett, which came sixth and seventh in nominations. Highest-ranked book by a woman: Half a Crown, by Jo Walton, 11th place.

Best Novella: "The Erdmann Nexus" by Nancy Kress (for my money the least impressive of the winning stories), with 341 final votes to 252 for "The Tear". "Truth" also overtook "The Tear" to come second; "True Names" fourth, "The Political Prisoner" fifth.

Best Novelette: "Shoggoths in Bloom" by Elizabeth Bear, by 331 to 309 for "Pride and Prometheus" (closest result for any fiction category). "Pride and Prometheus" second, "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story" third, "The Gambler" fourth, "Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders" fifth.

Best Short Story: "Exhalation", by Ted Chiang, by 385 to 330 for "26 Monkeys; also, the Abyss" which comes second; "From Babel’s Fall’n Glory We Fled" third, "Evil Robot Monkey" fourth, and (to my relief) "Article of Faith" fifth with 496 to 120 for "No Award" (best result numerically for "No Award" all evening).

All four written fiction awards go to previous winners; two to women, two to men; one to a writer born between 1942 and 1951.

Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will be Graded, by John Scalzi, by 285 to 233 for Rhetorics of Fantasy which comes second. What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction third, The Vorkosigan Companion fourth, Spectrum 15 fifth.

Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones by Kaja & Phil Foglio, with 290 to 239 for Serenity: Better Days which comes second. The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle third, Fables: War and Pieces fourth, Schlock Mercenary: The Body Politic fifth; interesting that Schlock Mercenary was the only one which was made available to all Hugo voters, and still came last! ("No Award" did well against it, 99 to 251.) Just missed nomination: The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite, by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba; Aetheric Mechanics by Warren Ellis; Freakangels by Warren Ellis; Fables: The Good Prince by Bill Willingham.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, by 417 to 318 for Doctor Who: Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, which comes second. Doctor Who: Turn Left comes third, Battlestar Galactica: Revelations fourth, and Lost: The Constant fifth (though with another good showing for "No Award", 111 to 323).

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: Wall-E walks it, crushing Dark Knight and Iron Man which come second and third respectively, 493 to 221 and 194. Hellboy II: The Golden Army fourth, METAtropolis fifth.

Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola (the second most nominated candidate, Stephan Martiniere, declined nomination)

Best Editor, Short Form: Ellen Datlow

Best Editor, Long Form: David G. Hartwell

Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales

Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede, by a mere 7 votes from File 770, 185 to 178

Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu (the most nominated candidate, Steve Stiles, declined nomination)

Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer: David Anthony Durham by a mere three votes from Aliette de Bodard, 161 to 158.

Congrats to all. (Numbers available here and here.)

A momentous day: the Wii proclaims that I am no longer obese, having crossed the magic boundary that lies somewhere between 78 and 77 kg for people of my height. Also my Wii Fit age this morning was a sprightly 33 (though that’s not far outside the usual range of late 30s, itself gratifying for a 42-year-old; and I once got a readout of 26).

Since recovering from my back problems of early June, I’ve been doing a Wii session most days before breakfast. I normally do two sets of paired routines from the Yoga and Muscle menus, then one of the rather dull and lengthy Aerobics routines, and finish with a Balance Game, which takes altogether 20-30 minutes. For each menu I start by picking one of the routines I have done least, to ensure variety.

My one complaint about the Yoga routines (and to a lesser extent the Muscle Workouts) is that you can’t always see the TV screen to get important information without wracking your neck. Admittedly my habit of doing the exercises while listening to Doctor Who audios means I can’t always hear the instructions, which is hardly their fault, but in any case the sound does not always cover for the visuals.

The Balance Games are the most varied and also the ones I am worst at. The very first one, heading the oncoming footballs, I simply cannot do; this morning’s rather lousy score of 39 is my pathetic personal best. Likewise the penguin slide leaves my poor little avatar looking rather hungry. (I am bad at the skiing ones as well, but the footballs and fish are more graphic indicators of my poor coordination.) However I love doing the Table Tilt, which seems to play more to my skills.

I see that there is an advanced version coming out in a few months: we will certainly get it. Young F is rather competitive and gloats whenever he knocks me off the top spot for one of the exercises. I indulge him; I can afford to be tolerant.

A separate entry is deserved for this 1980 cover for the Japanese translation of the first and greatest of the Doctor Who novelisations, Doctor Who and the Daleks by David Whitaker.

I would appreciate confirmation from Japanese scholars of the transliteration and translation of the title. The depiction of the Daleks is actually not a bad extrapolation from Whitaker’s text, which is very hazy on their actual dimensions.

Telos have really come up with the goods this time. This is an exhaustive history of the twenty-one years of publication of the Target novelisations of the classic Doctor Who television stories, buttressed by interviews with the writers and illustrators (most of whom get featured in sidebars as well as appearing in the main text, many of the interviews having been conducted by Tim Neal), and also with the various editors responsible for the line in a bewildering dance of corporate ownership and managerial responsibilities across several changes of parent company. It is beautifully illustrated with the art from the various books. Appendices list all the Who-related Target books (including Junior Doctor Who, Companions, compilations, quizbooks, cookbooks, Discovers, etc) and also the ones that weren’t published (including David Whitaker’s original outline for Doctor Who and the Enemy of the World, written in the end by Ian Marter after Whitaker’s death). Also, rather than trying to critique each novel anew, we get a report of fannish reviews at the time of publication (I was surprised to read of the negative reaction to Donald Cotton’s superb Doctor Who and the Romans). Terrance Dicks supplies a typically Terrantial foreword. Well worth adding to your Whovian reference collection.

I enjoyed this much more than On The Road. Even if I hadn’t seen two of the cinema versions (the ones with Glenn Close and Sarah Michelle Gellar), I think I would have found this a compelling tale. At first it seems to be a straightforward tale of manipulation and hypocrisy, with Merteuil and Valmont exercising respectively feminine and masculine wiles over their various prey. But the twists start to appear in the last quarter of the book, when Valmont’s very successes trigger a change of his own attitude, and Merteuil fails to catch onto what is happening in time to prevent his death and save her own reputation. Everyone comes out damaged or dead, with the exception of the odious Prévan who has played the game and won (but even so, his victory may be short lived). Yeah, I admit it is totally heteronormative and moralistic, but it is still a great read.

A book with hidden shallows, I felt. The narrator, Sal, tells us of his affection for and inspiration by his friend Dean Moriarty, and expects us to admire Dean’s exploitation of friends, relatives and women to maintain his transient, commitment-free lifestyle. I couldn’t bring myself to do so. The book’s defenders make claims that it tracks a mystical, religious journey; the journey I will agree to, but I saw no encouraging signs of spiritual growth. Each new destination seems much the same as the others: different boozing partners, different girls, but no big difference. The style is indeed entertaining and engaging, but I felt at the end that this short book was probably three times too long.

Following through some of the historical footnotes to the Birther madness, I discovered to my astonishment that the Northern Irish village of Cullybackey enjoys a peculiar prominence in debates on presidential eligibility.

For those who for some reason may not have heard of it, Cullybackey is a small village in County Antrim, 30 miles (50 km) from Belfast, close to the larger town of Ballymena. It is regarded as, for good or ill, the heartland of rural Ulster Unionist culture, possibly because its population is roughly 97% Protestant to 1% Catholic. Not exactly isolated – nowhere in Northern Ireland is, these days – it is nonetheless not really at the throbbing heart of modernity, or a place that one automatically thinks of as associated with political culture.

So why is it important in American constitutional theory? The local tourism website has the crucial clue: “Arthur Cottage, one of Cullybackey’s most popular tourist attractions, lies just outside the town and is the ancestral home of Chester Alan Arthur, the 21st President of the United States.” We will pass ruthlessly over any speculation about Cullybackey’s other popular tourist attractions, and cut to the chase. The Rev William Arthur was born in Cullybackey in 1796. He emigrated to Canada in 1818 or 1819, married a couple of years later, and his fifth child, the future President, was born in 1829.

It seems that the Rev William Arthur did not become a naturalised citizen until 1843, which according to a couple of the Birther sites (here and here) means that his son was not a “natural born citizen” of the United States. I confess I do not see the logic of this argument; nobody contests Arthur’s mother’s US citizenship, and it seems a perverse reading of things that aren’t in the constitution to say that his potential dual nationality due to his father’s British citizenship should block his claim to lifelong American identity.

It seems that Arthur’s eligibility was in fact raised during the 1880 election campaign when he ran and won the Vice-Presidency (and then succeeded as President a few months later when Garfield was assassinated). But the Birthers of the 1880s looked in the wrong place: Arthur Hinman, author of a pamphlet called “How a British Subject Became President”, alleged that Chester Arthur had been born in Canada or Ireland, and therefore could not be considered a “natural born citizen”. As with rumours of Obama’s birth elsewhere than Honolulu, it was not difficult to prove that Arthur had been born in Vermont. The question of his father’s citizenship issue remained unexplored. (Arthur, an ill man already, died a few months after his unexpected Presidential term ended in 1885. Most of his personal papers were destroyed.)

I doubt very much that I will bother to explore Cullybackey and its popular tourist attractions, but it gladdens my heart to know that a corner of my own homeland is providing yet more confusion to the Birther debates.

Collection of light-hearted scientific essays on Christmassy themes, mostly adapted from the author’s columns for the Daily Telegraph. Would be a suitable Christmas present for a scientifically minded teenager.

The latest wrinkle in the Obama birth certificate controversy has caught my attention because it reminded me of a couple of past incidents in my own experience. (For those who aen’t aware of it – there is no serious controversy about the time and place of President Obama’s birth, in Hawaii 48 years ago yesterday, as verified by his birth certificate and contemporary newspaper records; the controversy is over how dangerous we should consider the risk to be from those who maintain that he was actually born in Kenya, which would make him ineligible for the office of President of the USA.)

***

What prompted this post was the publication by Birther leader Orly Taitz of an obviously bogus birth certificate purporting to have been issued by the “Republic of Kenya” in early 1964, attesting to Obama’s birth in Mombasa (hundreds of miles from his father’s home town, but what the hell). Kenya did not in fact become a republic until December 1964, a year after independence, having spent the interim as a Dominion under the nominal rule of Malcolm MacDonald as Governor-General. This is not the only bogus element of the latest fake document in the case, but it is the most demonstrable flaw.

I was impressed by the amount of wishful thinking visible in the Birther community about this. A line of defence being peddled on some blogs and websites starts with the premise the Kenyan government really wanted to be a republic all along – which is certainly true – and therefore moves to the conclusion that Kenyan birth certificates in early 1964 were being issued on pre-printed forms in the name of a state which did not yet exist – a conclusion for which there is no evidence whatsoever apart from the bogus birth certificate. Indeed, with every other transitional state I have researched (and I have researched a lot of them) the problem is more usually the opposite – that the official forms take some time to catch up with the new designations. The Birther theory of Kenyan Anticipated Republicanism requires Jomo Kenyatta i) to have demonstrated an aggressive administrative ability beyond the capabilities of any other state which I have seen dealing with this problem, and also ii) to have challenged London by issuing documents in the name of a not-yet-existent Republic. Kenyatta has a very good reputation, so I guess that i) is not outside the bounds of possibility, but if he had attempted ii) there would certainly be plenty of records of it – being a republic or not was a very big deal in those days.

I find it very reminiscent of the debates I used to have on Usenet with people who thought that someone else wrote Shakespeare. Having gone into it with a relatively open mind, I soon realised that the Oxfordians and their rivals just were not interested in actual evidence; any data point at all was either co-opted to the theory or dismissed as obvious forgery, based entirely on the writer’s prejudices rather than on any other factors. I found Karl Popper’s analysis of why science is different from religion rather a helpful intellectual tool in those debates.

***

The other point that occurred to me is that the forgery itself is not actually intended to convince anyone other than the already convinced; indeed, it could even have been designed as a poison pill to damage the Birthers (though it is more likely that it was simply designed to make money from the gullible and deluded Ms Taitz).

I may have had experience of such a poison pill forgery myself. A few years ago, I came into possession of what purported to be a secret report by intelligence sources of a Francophone country about an Eastern European person who was a small part of a much larger research project on which I was then engaged. The report more or less repeated the gossip that was current about its subject, but of course was on official headed paper, stamped and signed by a senior government official.

Several things seemed a bit off about the document. The content was, in fact, nothing I did not already have from other less official sources. The name of the senior official who signed it seemed to be a combination of common names from the purported source country, and it was not easy to check whether someone of that name had ever occupied that position. But most crucially of all, the French was very bad, and consistently formed the perfect tense with the verb “être” rather than the verb “avoir”. Nobody with more than a very basic knowledge of French would make that mistake; “être” is used for the perfect tense of a handful of verbs, but this document used it for all of them.

As it happens, many Eastern European languages (most notably but not only Russian) form the past tense using the verb “to be” and the past participle, rather than the verb “to have” which forms the perfect tense in both English and French. The conclusion was clear: someone hoped that I would use the document as evidence about its subject, so that it could then be exposed as a fake and discredit me. I admit that I had a moment of wishful thinking, hoping that there might be some local dialectical usage of “être” which could mean it was still genuine. But that wishful thinking was rapidly replaced by astonishment at the forger’s audacity. They knew I was interested in the person in question, and if my desire for the document to be genuine had over-ridden my common sense, I would have fallen for it.

(For fairly obvious reasons, I am not going to give any further details about this incident, on or off-line.)

***

I feel a little sorry for Orly Taitz, whose desire to feed her deluded beliefs has clearly over-ridden what common sense she ever may have possessed. I am not sure whether or not to admire the forger. It is clear that not only Ms Taitz, but also many of her followers, are in fact convinced by the forgery, so unless the forger comes forward to expose it, they are buttressing and supporting the extreme views of a group of very insane people; some of whom are armed and dangerous. If whoever it was is out there reading this, the joke is over; it was a good one, and the point has been very well made, but it’s time to ‘fess up.

• Making Light: Pushing back
  Abi Sutherland on health care in the US, the UK and the Netherlands
  (tags: ushealth)

This is a Japanese graphic novel about autism, told from the point of view of young mother Sachiko Azuma, who realises quite early on that her baby, Hikaru, doesn’t respond like other children do, and in due course gets the diagnosis of her son’s disability. Most of the rest of the story is about her navigation of the Japanese social welfare system, and especially the education system: Hikaru is quite seriously disabled but is at least able to talk and participate in normal elementary school classes some of the time.

Every situation is different, and there was a lot here that didn’t especially resonate for me. Belgium’s services for people with disabilities score over Japan’s, at least by this account, as they score over those in most countries. On the other hand, I can’t help feeling a twinge of jealousy at the fictional Hikaru’s progress; sadly, not every case of autism has that element of positive progression. (Another important difference is that we have never had to deal with my wife giving birth while being rescued from a typhoon while I was on a business trip to Sweden, but I think we can allow Tobe some dramatic licence there.)

There were several things that really resonated with me. First, Keiko Tobe has really caught the look in the eyes of the autistic child – the manga style of enlarging the pupils emphasises her success – which makes everything else much more credible. Second, it’s fair to say that once parents have got the diagnosis, it is an awful shock but also a relief – at least you know your child isn’t dying, at least you know it is unlikely to get any worse. Most parents plan their lives around their aspirations for their children, after all; we simply have an unusual set of data points to deal with, and after a while one just gets on with it.

Third, and most of all, the real hell of raising an autistic child is dealing with other people. There are some godawful episodes here of drive-by parenting from know-nothing outsiders (and relatives), as well as hurtful encounters with uncaring professionals of the caring professions, which I found all too familiar. At least we haven’t had the equivalent of the unsympathetic family acquaintances who twice put Hikaru’s life in danger through callous negligence (though here I felt that Tobe let them off too lightly by pointing to a bad marriage as being at the core of the problem; I am afraid that people in good relationships are just as capable of being assholes).

The translators have printed the English version right-to-left, which I understand is fairly standard for manga but was new to me. I got used to it after a bit; young F, whose interest in the subject is every bit as keen as mine, was fairly racing through it earlier as well.

I would hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who actually has an autistic child, as they will already have their own local source of expertise on the subject and may possibly wish to read about other things in the small hours of the morning; on the other hand it will certainly be useful for their friends and relatives. It is also a pretty good human story in its own right. Thanks go to for introducing me to it.

• Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Re-reading Sandman: An introduction
  Teresa Nielsen Hayden is to reread the epic graphic novel series
  (tags: sf)
• frumiousb: Amsterdam Taxis Improved? Not one bit of it.
  Problems of getting a taxi in Amsterdam
  (tags: netherlands ripoffs)
• Wait, where did the astroturf go?
  So, farewell then
  The Tiraspol Times.
  Your funders have
  Pulled the plug.

  (tags: world, transdniestria)

Bookshopping in London yesterday, my eye was caught by the Mammoth Book of Mind-Blowing Science Fiction, edited by Mike Ashley. I have been suspicions of the Mammoth Books of anything sfnal since the publication of George Mann’s pisspoor Encyclopedia (I confess I have no idea if the two are related), so didn’t bother even looking inside.

It turns out that if I had looked inside, I might have spotted the rather peculiar choice of authors. Luckily others have done so for me, so I don’t need to worry any more about whether I might want to buy it.

(Hat-tip to and also to .)

The ARK research centre, with which I have the honour to be loosely associated, does an annual opinion survey of all 16-year-olds in Northern Ireland, and this book pulls together expert essays on some of the findings from the poll (along with a prize-winning essay about teenage life from one of the respondents). Topics addressed include perceptions of sectarianism, poverty, mental health and the structure of schooling, but the two standout chapters for me were on bullying, by Ruth Sinclair of the National Children’s Bureau, and sex education, by Simon Blake of the Brook Advisory Clinic.

While all schools claim to be committed to preventing bullying, very few have convinced their pupils that they are serious. Sinclair broadens out the discussion into examining the rather weak and inconsistent attitude of most Northern Irish schools to pupil participation. The evidence is thin but compelling: those schools which are able to reassure pupils that something will be done about bullying are also those with an active pupil council – a concept that was simply unthought of in my day, in my religious-controlled grammar school.

Likewise the concept of anything meaningful in the way of sex education – the only practical information that we got at school about contraception was a samizdat sheet of diagrams circulated by one of the more liberal teachers, not much use for those like me who weren’t in the relevant class. Of course, like most kids, I had my own sources of information, but my school failed – and I am sure that most Northern Irish schools failed and still fail – to provide much in the way of useful education about sexuality, preferring instead to reflect on the contents of letters of the Conference of Bishops (several of whom, it turns out, also had other sources of information).

Blake’s analysis, augmented by observations by one of his Belfast-based colleagues, is slightly weakened by the fact that they are activists as well, but the figures speak for themselves. Indeed, if anything Blake is too kind; he states that there is little to choose between the various schooling systems with regard to sex education, citing figures which make it quite clear that in fact it is Catholic pupils who are most likely to feel underinformed.

Anyway, it’s a nice little book which shows how academic research can become a building block in the wider social policy debate.

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)