More excellent development in this very enjoyable series. Most of the book concerns the first year in the life of Snow White’s children by Bigby Wolf, also the first year of the rule of Prince Charming after his displacement of Old King Cole. As usual, when I summarise it that way it seems absurd that I actually read it, but Willingham has made the survival of the Fable characters in today’s New York, escaping their Adversary, very readable and grown-up.

This book is a very good set of explanations and ideas for helping one’s child with Asperger’s cope with the school environment: how to work the system as far as it is possible. Much of it seemed to me like plain common sense, but I realise that comes from years of dealing with our own situation, and also must concede that I don’t recall seeing any of it written down anywhere previously. One very important point that Lawrence makes is that experience with and knowledge of Asperger’s will dwindle as you go up the school hierarchy – the part-time teaching assistant assigned to the class may well know more than the class teacher, who in turn will probably know more than the principal. Although she is writing for a British audience I think most of what she says applies here too (though I’m pretty sure our services are better in general). I do regret, however, that she chose to use masculine pronouns for the Asperger’s children and feminine pronouns for the teachers and other educators; it’s a bit odd that a book trying to fight stereotypes in one area reinforces them in another.

It’s ten years this month since Big Finish put the first of their audio Doctor Who plays on sale. I have just about caught up with the complete range (though not quite with all the spinoffs) and am mulling a big Big Finish post to explain it all to those of you (probably at least 90%) who haven’t listened to any BF plays. Meanwhile these are the ten I caught up with most recently, in order of internal continuity rather than of when I listened to them or of release (apart from the new Three Companions episodes which go with the discs they came on).

The Magician’s Oath, by Scott Handcock, is set at about the same period as Paul Magrs’ novel Verdigris which I was reading at about the same time. Mike Yates tells the story of a magician who is sucking up all of London’s energy. The plot is nothing terribly new; Richard Franklin does the voices adequately, as does Michael Chance playing the evil magician. Verdigris is better.

George Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago are not technically companions, and there is almost no trace of the Doctor, but Andy Lane’s The Mahogany Murderers is totally brilliant: the Victorian pastiche which he did so well in All-Consuming Fire, combined with the wonderful return of Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter (who apparently hadn’t seen each other since 1977) delivering a beautiful product. Even if for some peculiar reason you haven’t seen The Talons of Weng-Chiang, you will enjoy this; if you do know the older story, you’ll love the sequel.

The same, alas, cannot be said for Nigel Robinson’s The Stealers from Saiph, in which Mary Tamm going solo does a decently professional job of a rather lousy script involving alien goings-on in Antibes in 1929.

David Bishop’s Enemy of the Daleks came close to being an interesting story of the Seventh Doctor being manipulative with the time stream again (and trying to shield his companions), with some surprisingly good good John-Foxon-tries-to-be-Keff-McCullough music. Unfortunately it is badly let down by two terrible performances from the guest cast – Kate Ashfield and Bindya Solanki, who are both fairly well known actors but utterly fail to convince here as the officer and sergeant in charge of fighting off the Daleks. (Solanki is slightly better in the scenes on her own without Ashfield, but this is not saying much.) BF occasionally gets an under par performance (indeed, more often than not the regulars are the ones to blame) but it’s rare to have two of them in the one play.

Paul Sutton sometimes bites off a bit more than he can chew, and I think this happened in The Angel of Scutari: it’s a nice idea to have a fragmented plot, presented out of order, but Big Finish has done this before and better (most successfully with Creatures of Beauty). It seems also like an attempt to give Hex some character development, presumably in order to get rid of him some time next year, but ends up with Philip Olivier doing a one-note nursing whine while waiting for Florence Nightingale, while the Doctor and Ace shift rather confusingly between British and Russian captivity. The cast admit to their bafflement in the CD extras, and one can sympathise.

Those two CD sets / downloads also feature the second and third episodes of the ongoing arc of The Three Companions, by Marc Platt, concentrating on Polly’s reminiscences of a Two/Ben/Jamie adventure. The second episode was a bit dull in getting them all together on the planet where Something is Going to Happen; but in the third episode the Something actually Happens and it all seems to come together well.

Wirrn Dawn, written as well as directed by Nicholas Briggs, is OK but not spectacular, with the giant insects returning to torment Eight and Lucie, and also a rather colonial relationship between two human cultures. Actually I thought BF missed a trick here: most of the guest cast (Colin Salmon, Daniel Anthony, Liz Sutherland) are PoC, and we could have had a more thoughtful exploration of colonialism than we got.

With The Scapegoat, Pat Mills writes the second WW2 audio this year (the first being Steve Lyons’ Resistance). This is occupied Paris, but not as we know it; I kept on thinking of the line from Douglas Adams about the enormous mutant star goat, whose smaller cousins are running a theatre near the Moulin Rouge where the Doctor and Lucie find themselves performing. I listened to it twice and am not sure I quite understood it but I enjoyed it.

I was very unimpressed with Jonathan Morris’ The Cannibalists at first: as I have repeatedly said, I hate cute anthropomorphic robots and this seemed to be just a story of the Doctor and Lucie saving the nice robots from the nasty ones, enlivened by Phil Jupitus’ performance as the nicest of the nice ones. But there is a brilliant twist at the end which made me very glad I had stuck it out.

The season finale, by Eddie Robson, takes Lucie and the Doctor to near-future London where I have to admit that I was pleased and delighted by the revelation at the end of the first part of who the baddies actually were (though the titles of the plays, The Eight Truths and Worldwide Web contain pretty good clues). That was the best bit of it, unfortunately; yet another religious cult turns out to be brainwashing people for alien invasion, and the Doctor and Lucie spend a lot of time running around being imprisoned and attacked. Poor Stephen Moore, as the displaced cult leader, sounded more and more like Marvin as his lines got less and less interesting. I didn’t hate it quite as much as , but like him I was glad when it was over (finished it this morning while doing my Wii Fit routine so made sense to listen to the end).

So, of all of these, my only really strong recommendation goes to The Mahogany Murderers, which is also rather oddly the only one of the stories without an appearance from the Doctor or any of his companions. Most of the others can be skipped

…trawling eBay for Whovian bargains, my eye was caught by an entry which ran as follows:

Blood and Justice: The 17th Century Parisian Doctor Who

Sounds interesting – another bit of canon that I had been unaware of, I thought. But then I checked out the full listing:

The 17th Century Parisian doctor who made blood transfusion history…

In 1667 a Parisian doctor by the name of Jean-Baptiste Denis performed an operation that had never previously been attempted – he transfused blood into another human being.

Ah well, that explains it. (That phrase “made blood transfusion history” is odd, isn’t it? Makes it sound like he had it abolished!)

I enjoyed tremendously Griffiths’ more recent book, Who Goes There?, so thought I should read his earlier memoir about growing up as a Doctor Who fan. It’s amusing enough. Griffiths had a slightly but not very unusual childhood (much older parents, few close friends), and since then has had his fair share of career setbacks and failed relationships; he writes about it all with self-deprecating humour which could perhaps have been spiced up with a bit more passion. I imagine that people who like me and Griffiths were children in the UK in the mid-70s will enjoy this, but I think his other book has wider appeal.

A novel featuring the Third Doctor, Jo Grant, UNIT and Magrs’ own invention, Iris Wildthyme, a renegade Time Lady whose Tardis is shaped like a double decker bus and who claims to be the Doctor’s on-off girlfriend. Magrs recycled a lot of the jokes and some of the plot from this book for the Big Finish audio Excelis Dawn, with Iris (as per usual) played by Katy Manning. But Verdigris is an amusing sideways look at the Third Doctor era, with the bad guys in one scene trying to convince Jo that it is all a cruel hoax: “Think about every alen artifact or creature you have ever seen. Weren’t they always surrounded by a nimbus of blue light? Didn’t they sometimes look a little … unconvincing?” And Mike Yates gets reduced to a two-dimensional cardboard cutout, so not much change there then. It’s not terribly substantial, with some promising elements (eg Iris’ companion, Tommy) left unexplored, but quite good fun.

(I’ve also been listening to The Magician’s Oath from Big Finish, also set in this period; Verdigris is better.)

Read Catherine Kellogg’s explanation, which includes helpful icons to let you know if the author is a character and if the plot is self-contradicting. Then the usual: bold if you’ve read it, italic if you started it, struck through if you hated it.

Kathy Acker’s "In Memorium to Identity"
Donald Antrim’s "The Hundred Brothers"
Margaret Atwood’s "The Blind Assassin"
Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy
Nicholson Baker’s "The Mezzanine"
J.G. Ballard’s "The Atrocity Exhibition"
John Barth’s "Giles Goat-Boy"
Donald Barthelme’s "60 Stories"
John Berger’s "G"
Thomas Bernhard’s "The Loser"
Roberto Bolaño’s "2666"
Jorge Luis Borges’ "Labyrinths"
William S. Burroughs’ "Naked Lunch"
Robert Burton’s "Anatomy of Melancholy"
Italo Calvino’s "If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler"
Julio Cortazar’s "Hopscotch"
Robert Coover’s "The Universal Baseball Association, Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor"
Stanley Crawford’s "Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine"
Mark Danielewski’s "House of Leaves"
Don Delillo’s "Great Jones Street"
Philip K. Dick’s "The Man in the High Castle"
E.L. Doctorow’s "City of God"
Geoff Dyer’s "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D. H. Lawrence"
Umberto Eco’s "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana"
Dave Eggers’ "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"
Steve Erickson’s "Tours of the Black Clock"
Percival Everett’s "I Am Not Sidney Poitier"
William Faulkner’s "Absalom! Absalom!"
Jonathan Safran Foer’s "Everything Is Illuminated"
William Gaddis’ "JR"
William Gass’ "The Tunnel"
John Hawkes’ "The Lime Twig"
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "The Scarlet Letter"
Aleksandar Hemon’s "The Lazarus Project"
Michael Herr’s "Dispatches"
Shelley Jackson’s "Skin"
Franz Kafka’s "Metamorphosis"
Milan Kundera’s "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
Jonathan Lethem’s "Motherless Brooklyn"
Ben Marcus’ "Notable American Women"
David Markson’s "Wittgenstein’s Mistress"
Tom McCarthy’s "Remainder"
Joseph McElroy’s "Women and Men"
Steven Millhauser’s "Edwin Mullhouse"
Haruki Murakami’s "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
Vladimir Nabokov’s "Pale Fire"
Flann O’Brien’s "At Swim-Two-Birds"
Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried"
Harvey Pekar’s "American Splendor"
Thomas Pynchon’s "Gravity’s Rainbow"
Philip Roth’s "The Counterlife"
W.G. Sebald’s "The Rings of Saturn"
William Shakespeare’s "Hamlet"
Gilbert Sorrentino’s "Mulligan Stew"
Christopher Sorrentino’s "Trance"
Art Spiegelman’s Maus I & II
Laurence Stern’s "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy"
Scarlett Thomas’ "PopCo"
Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse Five"
David Foster Wallace’s "Infinite Jest"
Colson Whitehead’s "John Henry Days"

• The Hidden Messages In Hillary’s Speech – The Daily Beast
  My former colleague Heather used to write speeches for Hillary Clinton, but not this one.
  (tags: world)

…to yesterday’s question, as

gareth_rees

was first to get: the nth number in the qsequence is the lowest integer with n divisors.

1
1, 2
1, 2, 4
1, 2, 3, 6
1, 2, 4, 8, 16
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 18, 36
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, 48

so

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60

etc.

What is the eleventh number in this sequence?

1, 2, 4, 6, 16, 12, 64, 24, 36, 48

From The Onion, of course!

• Love and Liberty: How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal
  Alex updates his classic essay
  (tags: doctorwho libdems)

The family connection to the fall of the Bastille.

This is a travelogue of a journey through the five Central Asian former Soviet republics in the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the USSR. It had been lingering on my unread books shelf for a while, but I realised that in fact I had read it shortly after it came out. In those days I was interested then in the legacy of Tamerlane and Ulugh Beg in Samarkand, which Thubron indeed describes in so far as it was there to be found. These days I am more interested in the politics, and things have moved on quite a bit in the region: the Tajik civil war, just starting when Thubron was there, has now been over for more than a decade; meanwhile we have had a revolution in Kyrgyzstan, increasing repression in Uzbekistan, the bizarre rule and death of Turkmenbashi, and most of all the War on Terror in the immediate neighbourhood. So the book now feels very out of date. There are a lot of drunken feasts, departing Russians, sweeping generalisations about the facial appearance of people from particular ethnic groups, which I began to find tiresome very quickly. I believe that Thubron did a follow-up volume to this, retracing his earlier route, quite recently but won’t rush to pick it up (unless anyone strongly recommends it to me in comments).

• YouTube – Ukulele Orchestra of GB – Wuthering Heights
  Heathcliff? Heathcliff!
  (tags: music youtube)
• YouTube – 24 hrs of World Air Traffic compressed in 1 minute
  (tags: video)
• the pen is mightier than the spork: Stepping back
  Torchwood writer James Moran responds to fannish overreactions re Children of Earth
  (tags: torchwood)

I was mildly surprised a few years back to read an essay by Ken MacLeod praising Heinlein as the pre-eminent political writer of science fiction – my memories of Heinlein at that time shaped by his later more degenerate works. But Ken was right, and this I think is the novel where it all comes together, against which other depictions of politics in a future society must be measured.

Heinlein is clear that his Luna isn’t necessarily an ideal society (clearer than in some of his other books) but also clear that he wants us to think about the practical consequences of not having much in the way of government, and also to think beyond the Cold War divide which dominated political discourse at the time he was writing. His occasional use of Russian vocabulary is a) generally idiomatic, though one might quibble about the pronunciation and b) a challenge to readers wallowing in the comfortable dichotomies of their own day.

I loved the bits where the central characters plot the revolution – fairly standard revolutionary practice, of course, but interesting to see it so positively portrayed in a mainstream sf novel. My favourite parts, however, are on Earth, the manipulation of the F.N., Heinlein’s successor to the U.N., by the Lunar delegation which includes the narrator. In the 1960s, after the U.N. intervention in Congo, it was possible to imagine that a future world government would dispose of coercive military power. It seems pretty improbable now, and indeed Heinlein points out some of the reasons why it is improbable. It’s a nice touch to have a small African country be the only one to recognise the Luna government at first, rather as only Nicaragua and Russia now recognise Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The political discussion is supplemented by one of the great artificial intelligence characters of science fiction. Mike / Adam Selene could have been yet another irritating Heinlein know-it-all character, but here that role is split between him and the intellectual Professor Bernardo (himself rather modest as Heinlein intellectuals go) and the book is much the better for it. So we have a self-aware computer trying to get to grips with the weirdness of humanity, and by reflection showing us ourselves, yet at the same time in innocence providing the strategic leadership of the revolution. It stands the tired old Asimov laws of robitics on their head.

Heinlein’s ideas of sex on the moon are, alas, rather less convincing. Sure, gender issues will be rather different with institutionalised polyamory, but he rather over-eggs the benefits of his preferred arrangement, which in his account has no apparent drawbacks (or homosexuals) at all. Stranger in a Strange Land was less pleasant but more realistic on this subject.

The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress won the Hugo for Best Novel in 1967, the year I was born, beating two exceptionally good books which I have read – Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany and the full-length novel version of Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes – and three others which I haven’t heard of – Too Many Magicians by Randall Garrett, The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz and Day of the Minotaur by Thomas Burnett Swann. When I reread Stranger in a Strange Land I said I thought it was the best of Heinlein’s Hugo-winning novels; I have changed my mind.

Who fans who are interested in the Target novelisations might like to note that there is an excellent 20-minute documentary about Malcolm Hulke and his role in starting off the range, plus a look at each of his contributions to it, on the new DVD set of The War Games – if, that is, you need another reason to go and get it.

This makes it two such documentaries in a matter of weeks, since Mark Gatiss’s documentary on the range as a whole, On the Outside it Looked Like an Old Fashioned Police Box, was broadcast on 23 June. (And if you missed it then and haven’t managed to get hold of it since, let me know and I will see what can be worked out.)

• A Beginner’s Guide To Doctor Who DVDs – Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!
  (tags: doctorwho)
• William Leith discovers the hidden problems with living in a 24-hour world | Life and style | The Observer
  (tags: life)

Is the new DVD of the 1969 Doctor Who story, The War Games, eligible for next year’s Hugo award for Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form?

Or can the extras be considered eligible for Best Related Work?

On my first working day in Bosnia in January 1997, orienting myself in the National Democratic Institute’s office in Tuzla, I noticed that there is an area of that city called “Irac” – “Irishman”. I never found out why, and I am still wondering.

My office stationery suppliers often throw in free gifts with the latest order, often tacky kitchenware that falls apart after a few uses; this time it’s something a bit more sophisticated, a little GPS device for navigation while you are driving (specifically, a Connex GPC35Js running a system called PolNav Car Navigator).

My problem: turning the bugger on. The instruction booklet is fairly useless: it says that to get the initial GPS fix you have to have it outside in an area fairly clear of buildings for some time. But what it doesn’t give you is the crucial information of what state the unit should be in when you are getting that initial fix. Do I need to have the navigation software turned on, or does the unit magically know how to find the satellites anyway? And what of the mysterious “GPS test” hidden in the settings, where it seems to look for and find the satellite positions, but then not do anything with the information?

Suggestions gratefully accepted.

Some time ago I watched the Doctor Who spinoff video Downtime, written by Marc Platt and directed by Christopher Barry, which unites the Brigadier, Sarah Jane Smith, Victoria Waterfield and the Yeti. Platt’s extended novelisation, published as one of the Virgin Missing Adventures, is much better, with lots more background of Victoria’s life after leaving the Tardis and of the Brigadier’s later experiences; it also includes K9 and a young Captain Bambera. It even has some photos taken from the video, so you can pretend it was better than it was. And of course, being on paper rather than on screen, the effects can be as good as Marc Platt’s words make them, and Peter Silverleaf’s dismally poor acting is no longer a problem.

It’s still a somewhat confusing story, but it is well enough told, and apart from the many moments of continuity joy it also has interesting seeds of the later Sarah Jane audio and TV stories. So I think I can generally recommend it to Who fans. I was able to get it for £2.70 on eBay, so it’s not as difficult to find as some Who books are.

This anthology, edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, pulls together 20 short stories by writers of colour, all exploring different aspects of the colonisation experience through an sfnal lens. They are all very good. I found I had to read most of them very slowly to let the language settle into my brain; I think for that reason my attention lingered a bit more on the stories by Vandana Singh, Maya Khankoje and Tobias Buckell which made slightly fewer demands on me. This is a great anthology.

It was published in 2004. The Hugo Short Story shortlist for 2005, for which most of these would have been eligible, was of particularly poor quality (as I said at the time), and even the least impressive from the Hopkinson/Mehan anthology (I’ll identify it as devorah major’s “Trade Winds”) is a far better story than the Hugo winner (Resnick’s “Travels With My Cats”). None of the stories from So Long Been Dreaming got the 11 votes necessary to be recorded on the long list, let alone the 18 needed for the short list. It surely cannot be true that only ten (or fewer) Worldcon members had read So Long Been Dreaming before the nominations deadline? Something is wrong, or at least was wrong in 2005; this year things seem to have improved.

Alas, I was thoroughly spoiled for this by reading David Starkey and Alison Weir on the same subject last year. Though irritated by the writing style I kept hoping that at least I would learn something new; but when I had finished the first quarter of the book without finding anything that had not been covered better by either Starkey or Weir, I decided not to bother with any more.

I wasn’t hugely grabbed by Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but I quite liked this, Hardy’s first Wessex novel: a decent enough romantic plot, with some very good descriptive passages relating to the countryside. It seemed a much quicker and more enjoyable read than Tess, possibly because Hardy is not trying to be too Deep and Meaningful.

I cannot recall any tv show that I have watched generating as much polarisation as this week’s Torchwood. (Of course, I am slow at these things, and watched the later Buffy and mid-period West Wing only a couple of years after first broadcast.)

To generalise brutally, my impression is that a majority of the fanfic side of fandom was appalled, while the more literary sf side was generally fascinated, with plenty of exceptions on both sides. To summarise reaction from my f-list (a number of these posts are locked, so you’ll have to take my word for it):

Like it: here, here, here, here, here, Fiona Moore, I think here, more or less here, here, here, I think here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Don’t like it: here, here, here, here, (firstly) here, here, here, and here.

Further brief comment without saying if they liked it or not: here and here.

My own take: Count me on the fascinated side. Yes, it was derivative – particularly of the 1979 Quatermass, and the last scene being I admit more Douglas Adams (without the humour) than Acts 1:9 or E.T.. But, you know, that’s genre for you; and Quatermass and the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide are firmly established as major moments of British media sf, so it’s entirely understandable to try to moor your show in that tradition. Anyway, much great art is derived from other sources; the question is, does it add anything, and did it work dramatically?

My subjective answers are yes and yes. What was different this time was the radical step of actually developing Jack’s character. Tom Baker (most eloquently among many) has pointed out that the Doctor can never really change; there is always a reset button at the end of each story (and RTD has nibbled away at the first of those but not really the second). Jack, on the other hand, has now lost his lover, and then become a monster who sacrifices his own family, without their consent, to save the world; and now has to live with the knowledge of that action forever.

It worked dramatically for me largely because of the guest cast. Peter Capaldi as Frobisher in particular, but also Paul Copley as Clem, Nicholas Farrell as the PM (great choice of name, almost-but-not-quite Gordon Brown), Cush Jumbo as Lois, Susan Brown as Bridget, Lucy Cohu as Jack’s daughter, Ian Gelder as the sinister Mr Dekker and Katy Wix and Rhodri Lewis as Ianto’s sister and brother-in-law. the regulars all seemed to me at the top of their game as well (and I don’t share the view that Barrowman and Lloyd can’t act; they were certainly doing so on this week’s show). The fact that the actors clearly bought into the world that Davies and his team created made it convincing.

Was it manipulative? Well, of course. But I felt that some of the worst characteristic excesses of New Who were dialled down a bit here so that the acting and the script could do the work – thinking particularly of Murray Gold’s music, which occasionally has had to do the work of telling us how to feel when the rest of the show wasn’t up to it; also Davies has got much better at the pacing of his own scripts. Tony Keen has been cruelly accurate in describing some of RTD’s other work as resorting to Total Bollock Overdrive; I thought there was very little of that here.

It’s a subsidiary issue, but I did like the political parts of the show as well. There was a fascinating contrast between the largely static scenes of Whitehall (be it Downing Street or Thames House) and the dynamic hustle of Cardiff. Of course in Real Life, the government would not choose Frobisher’s children as the public examples, or hand out secret passwords to the new girl on her first day, or surrender quite so abjectly sovereignty to the Americans; but in Real Life they aren’t in touch with green aliens who survive on poison gas either. At least we hope not.

I can’t see there being any more Torchwood after this. The Hub is destroyed, Gwen presumably back with the police once she returns from maternity leave, and Jack off exploring the universe and dealing with his own demons. To reunite even Jack and Gwen (let alone Ianto) would require a reset button which is surely beyond even the powers of Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat combined. But we shouldn’t mourn; it was good this week, and I may be in a minority but I enjoyed the first two series as well. Sometimes it’s good to go out with a bang.

Edited to add: For more reactions see here.

…he zoomed off into the sky.

Just like that guy, y’know, E.T.

This is regarded as the great work of Belgian fantasy (at least in the novel form: there are loads of Belgian comics and films with sfnal content). It’s quite difficult to get hold of and I eventually picked up a copy of the 1998 Atlas Press translation on eBay. It appears at first to be about the peculiar inhabitants of the house of Malpertuis, in a city which is presumably Ghent in the dying days of Francophone supremacy; but in fact it turns into a peculiar confrontation between the organised Catholic church and the gods of ancient Greece. My edition makes the inevitable link with H.P. Lovecraft; I would add James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold as a potential source, and I wonder if Neil Gaiman drew on it, consciously or not, for American Gods (and likewise, for the nested narrative structure, David Mitchell for Cloud Atlas). Ray is not quite as terrifying as Lovecraft (though fairly gruesome in places), and he is certainly not as cheerful as Stephens, but he does add a certain level of surrealist incomprehensibility to the mix that is appropriate for a slightly older contemporary of Magritte, who like Magritte stayed in Belgium and wrote this book during the German occupation. Certainly an essential read for sf fans interested in Belgium, or Belgians interested in literary sf.

is one of several people who have recently shifted completely from Livejournal to Facebook, but now I know where he got his name from while he was here.

I have been reading up on Sudanese issues over the last few days, and have come to realise the depths of my ignorance on the subject.

I started with A History of Modern Sudan, by Robert O. Collins, the most recent of these three books (published in 2008). It is a good basic political overview of the history of the country since Mohammed Ali, the Albanian Ottoman ruler of Egypt, conquered it in 1821; followed by the religious rule of the Mahdi and his successors, and then then the peculiarly named condominium arrangement which preserved Egyptian sovereignty in theory but was completely British-led in practice. Independence brought an alternation between elected governments, military rule and (as at present) mixtures of the two.

(I was surprised that Egypt didn’t try very hard to reassert its theoretical sovereignty, either at the point of decolonisation in the 1950s or at any other point. Certainly it would have made a difficult situation even worse, but that isn’t a reason for it not to happen.)

Sudan was soon cursed with Africa’s first civil war, as the southern part of the country, promised autonomy by London but not given it by Khartoum, chafed under direct rule and various southern armed movements, with varying degrees of popular support, territorial control and external backers, challenged the central authority of the state (and Khartoum’s inclination to establish Islam as the state religion) and made parts of the south ungovernable and ungoverned. An autonomy deal in the early 70s was abrogated by Khartoum in the early 80s, and the most recent war kicked off, with horrible loss of life and destruction. Eventually in 2005 the southern leader, John Garang, and Sudan’s President Bashir signed a new deal for autonomy for the south (without Islamic law applying there) and an independence referendum in 2011.

Just a few weeks after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement came into effect, Garang died in a helicopter crash; meanwhile, elsewhere in Sudan the province of Darfur, long an arena of conflict between neighboruing Libya and Chad, had become the scene of appalling attacks upon civilians by government-led forces, as a result of which President Bashir was indicted by the international war crimes tribunal.

(Points not mentioned in the above summary: the southern oil reserves, the period of sponsorship of worldwide Islamic terrorism by Khartoum, Sudan’s previous and subsequent relations with the US and the West, questions of “Arab” and “tribal” identity, involvement of Ethiopia and Uganda, etc: all hugely important issues which I can’t do justice to here.)

Bashir’s indictment is outside Collins’ time frame, but the rest is all in there, and is (usually) soberly explained, with perhaps a mild bias towards an enlightened Khartoum perspective (which survives despite the decades of repression). For my own purposes I needed a run down of the basic political facts, and Collins provides them.

Douglas H. Johnson’s The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars, published in 2003 when the most recent north-south conflict was still raging, takes a more southern view than Collins, and indeed invokes anthropology (which I always appreciate) as much as political analysis to tell, essentially, much the same story. (Johnson snipes at some of Collins’ earlier work from the footnotes.)

Johnson’s focus is, not unreasonably, on the north-south conflict. He provides a much deeper understanding than Collins of what made the resort to war not only credible but almost inevitable – and not only between the south and the north, but within the south, in particular when John Garang’s lieutenant Riek Machar struck out on his own to lead what became a largely Nuer struggle against Garang’s largely Dinka forces (though as Johnson rightly points out, one should not try and categorise too rigorously). Apart from “tribal” identities, there was also the strategic choice between Garang’s ideal of a secular state in the whole of Sudan, with southern autonomy, or the option of independence for the south which Machar explicitly adopted.

Johnson finished his book before the most recent peace agreement, and although at first sight the agreement itself disproves his conclusion that conflict is deeply entrenched and self-perpetuating, in fact he highlights many of the issues which remain unresolved even now, and will need to be sorted out in the short to medium term if peace between north and south is to continue.

Johnson also points out that humanitarian aid itself becomes a factor in the perpetuation of conflict: inevitably, the deliverers of such aid must compromise with (and thus empower) certain local forces against others. It certainly isn’t news to me (I remember seeing, and indeed buying, food in our local shops in Bosnia which had been stolen from the World Food Programme), but I think it’s worth adding that organisations which claim to be devoting all their resources to aid on the ground, without campaigning on the issues at home, are likely to be colluding with their local warlords without doing anything to challenge those power structures.

While Johnson’s book is very good at getting into the mechanics of South Sudan, I thought he missed on two other important areas. First, he seems to see the Darfur (and other) problems in the north as reflections of the north-south question. It’s pretty clear that there are plenty of indigenous and external factors to make Darfur unstable even if the South were not an issue (and in fairness to Johnson, his book was finished before the worst in Darfur). Second, in his introduction he claims that conflict in Sudan, as elsewhere, is caused by internal problems being escalated by external actors. It’s not at all clear to me, on the evidence that he and Collins present, that external actors were a prerequisite for the outbreak of conflict. It is, however, clear that external actors have played a crucial role in ending it – the 1972 autonomy deal would not have happened without Ethiopia, the current peace agreement is particularly a credit to Kenya. But the merit of Johnson’s book is that he writes clearly enough that one can make up one’s own mind about the extent to which the facts he presents justify his conclusions.

The split between John Garang and Riek Machar is the backdrop for the closing chapters of Emma’s War, by Deborah Scroggins. Emma McCune was the daughter of colonial parents, kicked out of India in the 1960s. They split up and her father committed suicide; Emma grew up with that missionary zeal which one sometimes encounters, to make the world a better place regardless of the personal consequences.

A lot of Scroggins’ narrative isn’t actually about Emma McCune, but about the horrors of the Sudanese conflict and the ensuing famine, which she covered as a journalist. She gives a decent summary of the background history but her strength is the human dimension. Both Collins and Johnson record, for instance, that when the refugee camps in Ethiopia closed in 1991, their inhabitants returned to South Sudan, causing further strain on local and international resources; but Scroggins was actually there, and converts the historical record into the sight of thousands of human beings trudging desperately along the Sobat river, being strafed by Sudanese planes and raided by bandits, in just one of many vivid descriptive passages which will linger with me for a long time.

Scroggins is also very good at describing the mentality and lifestyle of the foreign aid workers in a crisis situation. Where Johnson raises (reasonable) doubts about the entire enterprise, here we have an explanation of the zeal that motivates people to get into the field and do what they can for humanity. It’s a world I have dipped into (particularly in my time in Bosnia) and I recognised most of the characters who Scroggins describes. (And one or two of the actual people.) Her insider critique of why the rest of the world engages with humanitarian crises is very well argued.

One of the most intensely engaged of the expats was, of course, Emma McCune, who got heavily involved with delivering educational aid and trying to liberate child soldiers, largely in the Nuer areas of the SPLA-held south. She then went one further by marrying the local warlord, Riek Machar, who shortly after split from John Garang, creating a civil war within the SPLA. Machar’s new English wife was blamed for this by Garang’s supporters, but Scroggins is pretty clear that “Emma’s War” was not her fault.

One other figure who repeatedly appears in the narrative is the British businessman Tiny Rowland, who I knew of only as the owner of the Observer newspaper, but who of course had made his fortune by building up his company, Lonrho (from London and Rhodesia) into a conglomerate with tentacles all over the continent. Rowland, never a man for modesty, claimed in one conversation to have created the SPLA. He certainly played a crucial role in its history, and in the internal politics of many other African countries; like Emma McCune, he had a particular obsession with Sudan.

Emma McCune and her unborn baby were killed in a traffic accident in Nairobi only two years into her marriage. Scroggins follows the story a bit further – Machar signed a separate peace with Khartoum, and found another wife, this time from Minnesota; after Scroggins’ book was published, Machar actually reconciled with Garang and, with Garang now being out of the picture, is again one of the leading figures in south Sudan.

All three of these books are probably essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about Sudan. But Emma’s War is one of the best books I have read this year, and is I think essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about the human condition.