I’m in China for Worldcon, so blogging for the next few days has been set up in advance to cover this year’s Clarke Award finalists. (Right now, I should be on the direct flight from Brussels to Beijing.) I’ve already posted my quick reviews of 69 of the submissions, and will hope to come back some time for the other 21…
The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift had by far the fewest owners on either Goodreads or LibraryThing, so few that I was a little suspicious that it might have come from a vanity press. But in fact the explanation is that the publisher sadly went out of business and therefore wasn’t able to do the usual promotional activities. This is a real shame, because the book is a gem. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
She checked the mirror again. The horizon was empty, not a hint of approaching storm. But the dust was always there, at her back. She saw it even on days like today, when there was nothing but the wheel and the road and the infinite red and the depleted husk of country – and yes, the infinite blue. She focussed ahead, let the sky settle in her gaze. Some things never let you go, no matter how far you drove.
It’s set in three timelines, the past, the present and the future, in and around Australia. (Apparently the author has not actually been to Australia, but I couldn’t tell.) The unifying theme is environmental apocalypse, as observed by women scientists; the three plots are each engaging on their own terms, and then the linkage at the end is very satisfying. A real warning about what we are doing to our world and ourselves. It is very much in keeping with the spirit of other recent Clarke winners, and Sir Arthur himself would have appreciated the diving scenes; personally I was especially grabbed by the nineteenth century science. Recommended (like all of the Clarke finalists). You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
One of the rare months (apart from pandemic times) when I did not leave Belgium, or even venture far from my normal Brussels-home-Tienen axis. I wrote about Kurt Vonnegut’s muse, and the top and bottom rated Doctor Who episodes on IMDB.
I did not write it up properly at the time, but Anne and I went to the Musée Fin-de-Siècle in Brussels and were really impressed by a couple of the pieces on display:
Emigrants, by Eugène LaermansPromenade, by Theo van RysselbergheMarketplace, by James EnsorThe Dragonfly, by Isidore Verheyden
Crucially, this was the month that I stopped shaving. Ten days in, it was looking promising, though one or two of my colleagues were more advanced than me.
I read 35 books that month.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 48) Amy Dillwyn, by David Painting After the War: How to Keep Europe Safe, by Paul Taylor The Popes and Sixty Years of European Integration How to End Russia’s War on Ukraine, by Timothy Ash et al Blackpool Remembered, by John Collier Drawing Boundaries, eds John C. Courtney, Peter MacKinnon and David E. Smith (did not finish) The Deadly Assassin, by Andrew Orton The Awakening, by David Evans-Powell One Bible, Many Voices: Different Approaches to Biblical Studies, by S.E. Gillingham
Non-genre 7 (YTD 14) The Cider House Rules, by John Irving A Burglary, or, Unconscious Influence, by Amy Dillwyn Jill, by Amy Dillwyn Jill and Jack, by Amy Dillwyn Nant Olchfa, by Amy Dillwyn The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers
Poetry 1 (YTD 4) The Prophet, by Khalil Gibran
SF 12 (YTD 122) The Memory Librarian, ed. Janelle Monáe Atlantis Fallen, by C.E. Murphy In the Serpent’s Wake, by Rachel Hartman Ancient, Ancient, by Kiini Ibura Salaam Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, ed. Paula Guran The Drowning Girl, by Caitlin R. Kiernan Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree Tofu Brains: Life on Zeeta 21, by Lars Koch There Will Be War Volume X, ed. Jerry Pournelle (did not finish) Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut Knights of God, by Richard Cooper The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 21) Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who – The Awakening, by Eric Pringle
Comics 4 (YTD 14) Arena of Fear, by Nick Abadzis et al Saga, Vol. 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan Partitions irlandaises, by Vincent Baily and Kris Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
8,200 pages (YTD 54,900) 17/35 (YTD 94/225) by non-male writers (Gillingham, Dillwyn x 4, Christie, Sayers, Monáe, Murphy, Hartman, Salaam, Guran, Kiernan, Novik, illustrators of Arena of Fear, Staples, Bonvillain) 2/35 (YTD 30/225) by a non-white writer (Gibran, Salaam)
The best of these was The Cider House Rules by John Irving; you can get it here.
Margery and her husband, Guilhabert, had only one child. She was a child of love and as such bore all the signs of a blessed conception. Her eyes were bright and aware, her small hands curious and slim-fingered, her complexion pinkly perfect. Every inch of her tiny body was perfect. Margery would sit in the garden with her; beside the flowering herbs and the small apple tree they had planted on the day of her birth, and sing the few small songs she knew. Guilhabert doted on her, as fathers often do with their daughters. He would pick flowers for his two beloveds, and for me, each day. He would wander into Gauzia’s room before daybreak and place the small posy by her sleeping face, touching her flushed cheeks with just the tip of his finger.
This won the Tiptree Award in 2014. It’s a complex and richly written story set in several different centuries, involving a woman who is part-human, part-machine and the entanglements that she gets into. I’m afraid it’s a rare “Meh” from me in this sequence of reading. I don’t like cute anthropomorphic androids anyway, and I didn’t quite have the energy to get into the layers of writing. You can get it here.
The Tiptree Honor List included eight novels, a short story by Aliette de Bodard and a music album by Janelle Monáe. I have read two of the novels, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie and Hild by Nicola Griffith, and liked them both more. (Personally I don’t think Hild is sf; but it was also a finalist for the Nebula.)
The following year, the Tiptree Award went jointly to The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne and My Real Children by Jo Walton; the BSFA Award to Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie; and the Clarke Award to Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel. That was my first year as a Clarke judge, and I read them all (they were all submitted) but did not write any of them up at the time. So I will return to them now.
I will be in Chengdu next week for the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, and have looked for some contemporary Chinese fiction set there. (Having been deeply unimpressed by a couple of American memoirs.) There’s not a lot available in English, but there is more than nothing.
Death Notice and Fate, by Zhao Haohui, are the first two volumes in a trilogy, featuring the Chengdu Criminal Police and a ruthless serial killer (or killers). The second paragraph of the third chapter (in the original Chinese) of Death Notice is:
Two years prior, Zheng had moved his family out of police housing to a quiet new apartment far from the tumult of downtown Chengdu. Rather than let the aging police apartment lie idle and unused, Zheng still spent nights there whenever he worked overtime. It allowed him to keep in touch with colleagues, and helped to avoid disturbing his sleeping wife and daughter. He called it his second office.
translated by Zac Haluza
Here’s the second paragraph of the third chapter of Fate. To my surprise, I found that the original text has a bit more characterisation in it, which did not make it into the published translation.
Captain Pei passed a folder to the commissioner. ‘An unidentified man gained access to our PSB archives yesterday afternoon while masquerading as an officer. He made copies of thirteen files, but this was the one he wanted. From his behaviour and his signature, I’m confident that this man is Eumenides.’
Captain Pei’s expression was calm, and it was difficult to see the emotions in his heart from his face, except that his eyes were slightly red, which was obviously the effect of fatigue caused by staying up late. He pushed a folder in front of Commissioner Song, and while the latter was unpacking the file, he reported: “Yesterday afternoon, a strange man disguised his identity and broke into the criminal investigation archives room. He copied and took away more than ten files, but this one was his real purpose. Judging from his behavior and his signature, we believe that this man is Eumenides.”
Original
Zac Haluza translation
My translation
I have to be honest; I didn’t get a strong sense of Chengdu from these two. There is a certain genre about killers who are superbly able to outwit the forces of law and order – The Silence of the Lambs is the most obvious, but I also recently read Thirteen by Steve Cavanaugh – and there were several scenes where I found it very difficult to suspend my disbelief – though a couple of these are in fact fairly well grounded in local scenery, a murder carried out in full view of the police in front of the Deye Building in Citizens’ Square, and another historical gruesome death at Mount Twin Deer Park, none of which are locations that I have been able to identify on the map. The series is a good enough example of its kind, the tensions between cops from the city and periphery, university graduates and non-graduates, and men and women, all well portrayed against a somewhat implausible backdrop; the means and motivation of their opposition remaining unclear. The situation is sufficiently generic that the first book was adapted without difficulty into a film made and set in Hong Kong, released (after much delay) earlier this year. You can get the two books here and here.
Leave Me Alone, by Murong Xuecun, is a different matter. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
I had an ominous hunch that this was Fatty Dong’s trickery. That prat had naturally rushed to sit at the front with the eunuch from Head Office. He looked like an attentive grandson with his notebook spread on his knee, his fat face one big smile. When the time came to make his own report, he gave me another subtle jab in passing: ‘Manager Chen, your skills are great, but you’re not such a good team player.’ I looked at him: the arsehole was wearing an elegant pair of braces, and was bent over writing something in his notebook. I cursed him silently: Are those farts really worth writing down?
translated by Harvey Thomlinson
The novel’s title in Chinese is “Chengdu, Forget Me Tonight“. It is a dark and steamy story of a car salesman who is cheating on his wife with his best friend’s fiancee, among others, and viciously jockeying for position with his colleagues. It was originally published on the online bulletin board of the company where the author worked as, er, a car salesman. Edited to add: The author read this review and contacted me to say that actually he was in HR, not sales, but also that the protagonist was based on a real colleague.
It’s brutally honest self-observation by the main character; not quite Joyce or Salinger, but a gripping window into a society which is not really so very different from ours. Although I suppose a lot of the action could happen anywhere, the setting feels firmly rooted in the sordid suburbs and old-fashioned rural periphery of Chengdu, and the couple of locations that I checked out did seem to really exist. It’s a shame that the protagonist is such an asshole, but of course that is really the point. You can get it here.
The author has since been exiled from China for writing about state corruption and the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. I think we’ll hear more of him in the future.
An interesting feature of all three of these books is the ubiquitous internet bulletin-board, which can be either public or internal to a company or organisation. Zhao Haohui’s Captain Pei reflects on the impact on public discourse:
After all, China was changing. Citizens had more options for obtaining information and were more open-minded than ever. The best way to steer public opinion would be to provide people with more information and let them draw their own conclusions.
The agenda is out for the WSFS Business Meeting to be held in Chengdu. (Here, and here in Chinese.) A lot of amendments to the rules and the constitution are proposed; some of them are good; some of them are pointless; and some of them are wrong. Everyone will agree on that much but not everyone will agree on which is which. The proposals are as follows:
A.1.1.A Marks Authorization
✓ Sensible tidying up of the responsibilities for protecting the WSFS Marks.
A.2.1.A Discussion Items
✓ Allows the Business Meeting to discuss issues raised by its own committees without having to vote on them. This would have avoided the need for some of last year’s shenanigans.
A.2.1.B Business Meeting Contingencies
and other changes
✓ Makes sensible provision for cases where the Business Meeting does not take place or is not quorate. Let’s hope it’s never used, but sensible to have.
A.2.1.C Consistent Change
and more along these lines
✓ Clears up a lot of language which had been made obsolete by the shift to WSFS members as a concept. Won’t satisfy any who opposed that shift but makes life easier for the rest of us.
B. Financial reports
😲 Not a matter for voting, but wow, this year’s NASFic, Pemmicon, had expenditure 40% higher than its income. Doesn’t really endear me to the concept of the NASFiC (on which, more below).
C.1 Bilingual Debate at Business Meeting
🤷 Good as far as it goes to say that bilingual debate should be provided for at a Business Meeting outside an Anglophone country, but not sure that it needs to be encoded into the Constitution in this way, and not sure that this wording is really strong enough if it does.
D. Eligibility extension
✓ Three films that were not widely distributed in 2021 and which the Business Meeting can declare to be eligible for 2022. I am always inclined to be generous.
E.1 The Zero Per Cent Solution (referred for ratification from 2022)
✓ Removes a ticking time-bomb in the constitution which could have led to accidentally No-Awarding less popular categories in a year where there are one or two very high-profile nominees.
E.2 Best Game or Interactive Work (referred for ratification from 2022)
plus some other consequential changes, ending with
✓ There are already too many Hugo categories, but this is an extensively researched and well thought out proposal which will align the awards more closely with what fans are actually doing.
F.1 Convention Time Bracket
🤷 Invokes incapacity of a convention committee where the date slips past December of the year of the convention. Not sure that this is needed, or that it is needed in this form.
F.2 Bid Committee Contactability
🤷 Not clear to me that this needs to be encoded into the constitution, or, if it does, that this is the right information to require.
F.3 Site Selection Ballot Provisions
❌ Two provisions which both tighten up the information that is required to validly fill in a site selection ballot. I think both proposals go in the wrong direction – we should be making it easier to participate, not tougher – and I suspect that either would risk violating EU data protection legislation, as indeed does the current (admittedly unclear) wording. I will vote against both.
F.4 Hugo Awards Criteria for Non-English Works Eligibility
✓ A helpful clarification of the rules, formally adopting a decision already taken by this year’s Hugo administrators. But I will vote against any attempt to further formally quantify the conversion ratios.
F.5 Best Fancast Not Paying Compensation
✓ Seems to me sensible that the Fancast ballot should not include professional productions.
edited to add: I am changing my vote here to an ❌. Subsequent discussion on File 770 made it clear to me that there are nuances here that need to be taken into account, and that it is a bad idea to try and hardwire a general over-arching definition of fan vs pro activity into the Constitution, as was advocated by some last year. The fan/pro line falls rather differently between zines, ’casts and art, and the definition of each category should clarify the boundaries for that category only; there is no need to make a general rule.
F.6 Best Young Writer
❌ There are already too many Hugo categories. Creates a new award for a writer under 24 who has got published in the last year. From what I’ve seen of some previous nominees in that age bracket, this is going to be about boosterism rather than quality.
F.7 Clarifying Language Requirements
✓ Goes without saying, but sometimes these things need to be said. This and the next proposal are discussed in this File 770 thread.
F.8 Remove Regional Limitation
❌ The proposal seems to be based on a misunderstanding – the current system actually benefits non-US works over US works by giving them a second chance to get on the ballot. If we ever have a situation where North American voters are not consistently the largest bloc among the Hugo electorate, we can look at whether this is still needed, but for now it’s a protection against US dominance, and should not be changed.
F.9 Establishment of ASFiC
and several more paragraphs
❌ Having an ASFiC is a great idea, but WSFS should not be in charge of it. Likewise, WSFS should not be in charge of NASFiC, which should instead be abolished in its present form. See this File 770 discussion thread.
F.10 Best Game Category
🤷 Hopefully E2, which is better worded, will pass and this won’t need to be considered.
F.11 Independent Films
❌ There are already too many Hugo categories. Not everything needs to get a Hugo. Having not one but two awards for independent films is definitely excessive, and the definition of what is and isn’t an independent film will be a major headache for administrators.
No doubt the Business Meeting will take a different approach. (It usually does.) But the above is how I think I will be voting.
Accustomed to depending on the largesse of his family, Pierce [Butler, Fanny’s husband] lacked independent wealth, vocation, or even direction for his life. His brother, John, was also “a mere idler … totally without education or intellect,” but he had married an heiress, Gabriella Morris, and was comfortably fixed “in dress, house & equipment.”
To refresh your memory, when Fanny Kemble was born in 1809, her father’s family completely dominated the British theatre world; her aunt was the famous actress Sarah Siddons, the oldest of a dozen Kemble siblings who all went into show business. The family fell on hard times in the 1820s and ruthlessly marketed her as Juliet, both in London and in North America. She married a charming American in 1834, but discovered that the foundation of his wealth was slavery; they separated and eventually divorced. Her ex-husband also fell on hard times and auctioned off 436 slaves, the largest slave auction in American history, in 1859. Her book about life on the plantation, based on letters written in 1838-39, was published in 1862 and effectively deterred British sympathy for the Confederacy. She returned to London in 1877 and lived there for the rest of her life, performing on stage occasionally, but usually doing solo readings (she was clearly very good at it). She died in 1893.
I’m glad to say that I’ve finally found a book about her that I can recommend to the curious. Like Constance Wright, Catherine Clinton in Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars concentrates on her American experience, but gives a lot more context and depth, and gives due regard to the English parts of her life. (We think of her as English, but her mother was born in Vienna to a Swiss mother and French father.) She does not shy away from the political side of Kemble’s life, and it’s made clear that a large part of what drove her was determination to improve the situation of women (though she rejects “organised feminism” on page 235). As I mentioned in one of my previous reviews, while audiences (and her husband) loved to see her as Juliet, her favourite Shakespeare character was Portia. (Merchant of Venice Portia, not Brutus’ wife in Julius Caesar.)
Clinton also adds much more about Kemble’s family than I think I had seen before. The fact that her favourite aunt died as the result of a coach accident soon after they had arrived together in America must have resonated profoundly for her. Clinton also traces her and her siblings’ descendants in America – her two daughters were estranged to different degrees by their parents’ bitter separation, and ended up basically on opposite sides in the Civil War; in 1874, her English nephew married the daughter of the President of the United States in a ceremony at the White House.
Due to my interest in Doctor Who, I’ve read a fair number of showbiz memoirs, and I have come to the conclusion that most actors are interested in themselves and in acting, usually in that order, and in not much else. I think it’s appropriate that Clinton treats Kemble’s theatrical career as of secondary importance to her writing and her activism. Although Kemble is always remembered as an actress, in fact she spent only five years out of her eighty-four as a regular performer in plays; but she leveraged the reputation that she had earned for the rest of her career. (And the revenue from her later solo readings cannot have done her any harm.) She enlivened a rich life experience by writing well, and I should start reading some more of her original work. Meanwhile, you can get Clinton’s biography here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Politics: Between the Extremes, by Nick Clegg.
Current About Time 9, by Tat Wood and Dorothy Ail Fate, by Zhao Haohui 2024, by Robert Durward
Last books finished Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Facing Fate: Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al Locklands, by Robert Jackson Bennett Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin
Next books Doctor Who: Earthshock, by Ian Marter No, But I Saw the Movie, ed. David Wheeler A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford
On 20 July, the day before our public holiday for Belgium’s National Day, I shaved my entire lower face and neck for the last time. The last time forever? I don’t know. The last time to date, anyway.
Photo taken in London by my colleague Andrei Goldis
I had tried this a couple of times before. In 1985, aged 18 and fresh out of school, I grew a moustache, which I kept until 1994; it defaces our wedding photographs, unfortunately.
Indeed, living in Germany in 1986, at the point I turned 19, I even grew a beard; not terribly successfully.
I had thought of giving the beard another try over last Christmas, and stopped shaving on 15 December; but then a crucial work meeting came up on the 20th, and I decided that I couldn’t really do it with five-day stubble.
I don’t really like the way my mouth looks in these pictures, and that was one more reason to try and grow a beard, to conceal the tight grimace I sometime unconsciously slip into.
Why? Well, I am 56 and can’t really carry off the “smart young man” look any more. My once fine head of hair has been thin on top for many years. I was interested to see whether, almost four decades on from my last attempt, the results might be different. I was also somewhat inspired by a former colleague who is about the same age as me, and pulled off the transition to distinguished beard a few years back.
Part of it also came from my genealogical researches. My father grew a beard one summer when he was 52, a bit younger than I am now, but was unsatisfied with the outcome and shaved it off again at the end of the holiday. My mother’s father was clean-shaven, and so were both of her grandfathers, at least in all surviving photographs and memories. My father’s father had a neat military moustache for most of his life. But both my father’s grandfathers sported splendid whiskers. (They never met each other; John Joseph Whyte had been dead for over a decade by the time his son met Henry Deming Hibbard’s daughter in 1927.)
My great-grandfather John Joseph Whyte (1826-1916)My great-grandfather, Henry Deming Hibbard (1856-1942)
So there is some cause for hope from my genetic heritage. (Both salt rather than salt-and-pepper, at least in the evidence we have.)
For completeness, here are my beardless forefathers of the last three generations.
Left: my father, John Henry Whyte (1928-1990); top centre, my paternal grandfather, William Henry Whyte (1880-1949); bottom centre, my maternal grandfather Sean Francis Murray (1909-1976, bottom); right, my maternal great-grandfathers, William Murray (1876-1956, top) and James Stewart (1885-1954, bottom)
A majority of my male work colleagues have beards of varying degrees of success – here is a photo from an office outing to the pub last week, and as you can see beards outnumber the cleanshaven by eight to five among the adult men. (The smallest male in the picture is too young to shave. Another very young chap was also present, but didn’t catch the photographer’s eye.)
I feel right now that I’ll probably keep the beard for a bit. I was perhaps hoping for a salt-and-pepper effect, but in the end I got only salt. It’s been a little weird to adjust to the fact that the edge of your body is no longer quite where it used to be. But I can adapt to that; people adapt to much worse, after all. I also just like stroking it – it’s a completely natural gesture. It does occasionally itch; but everything occasionally itches.
And the key stakeholder approves, so that’s a decisive factor.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I had three trips outside Brussels this month, the first to Zagreb for a conference commemorating the tenth anniversary of their EU membership:
I then had a business trip to Paris, and a combined business / Clarke tip to London, taking the day in between to catch up with my cousin in Dover.
We ended the month with a work outing swinging from trees in Wavre, which I had done a couple of times before. My actual swinging was not so effective but I am good at waiting for my turn on an elevated platform.
Non-fiction 8 (YTD 40) A Brief History of Stonehenge, by Aubrey Burl Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, by Mary Beard The Shape of Irish History, by A.T.Q. Stewart The Robots of Death, by Fiona Moore City of Soldiers, by Kate Fearon The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang, by Philip Bates Franco-Irish Relations, 1500-1610: Politics, Migration and Trade, by Mary Ann Lyons Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, by Jessica Bruder
Non-genre 3 (YTD 7) Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin The Rebecca Rioter, by Amy Dillwyn Chloe Arguelle, by Amy Dillwyn
SF 10 (YTD 110) The Revolution Trade, by Charles Stross Plutoshine, by Lucy Kissick Metronome, by Tom Watson Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette de Bodard The Anomaly, by Hervé le Tellier World’s Fair 1992, by Robert Silverberg “Bears Discover Fire”, by Terry Bisson Aurora: Beyond Equality, eds Vonda N. McIntyre and Susan Anderson The Hemingway Hoax, by Joe Haldeman
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 19) K9 Megabytes, by Bob Baker Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, by Terrance Dicks Corpse Marker, by Chris Boucher
Comics 1 (YTD 10) The Endless Song, by Nick Abadzis et al
7,200 pages (YTD 46,900) 12/26 (YTD 78/191) by non-male writers (Beard, Moore, Fearon, Lyons, Bruder, Zevin, Dillwyn x2, Kissick, de Bodard, McIntyre / Anderson, Endless Song illustrators) 2/26 (YTD 28/191) by a non-white writer (Zevin, de Bodard)
I really liked all five of the Clarke shortlistees that I reread this month – Plutoshine, by Lucy Kissick (get it here); Metronome, by Tom Watson (get it here); Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman (get it here); The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette de Bodard (get it here); and The Anomaly, by Hervé le Tellier (get it here).
I also really liked Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin, which was a Clarke submission but not actually sf (get it here); and Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder, on which the Oscar-winning film was based (get it here).
However you can skip World’s Fair 1992, by Robert Silverberg. (Or get it here.)
The rest of the day had been nothing short of torture. Nell had spent hours answering Lieutenant Cabe’s endless questions and accepting Swann’s comfort, the whole time not daring to open her bag to take out her spare granola bar, or phone, or even her lip balm, lest she draw attention to what was also inside. After Lieutenant Cabe had finally let her go, she’d had to return to Classic, where Humphrey had told her she was now on bereavement leave for the rest of the week. She’d argued that she didn’t need it, but family was family, he’d said, and refused to believe she was fine. He was from a gigantic one, several generations all crammed together in the same ancient house on Long Island.
One of the books submitted for the Clarke Award which was clearly not science fiction; a New York map specialist discovers the magical effects of a map owned by her father, also a map specialist who dies mysteriously at the start of the book. It has sold massively well, but I didn’t think it was all that special – implausibly kept family secrets don’t often convince me; maybe it appeals more to people who haven’t read much liminal fantasy before. You can get it here.
This hit the top of four of my lists simultaneously: top unread book acquired this year, top unread book by a woman; top unread book by a non-white writer; and top unread sf book. (All as measured by number of owners on LibraryThing). Next on those piles respectively are Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne; Winter, by Ali Smith; Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata; and Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones.
— Gick det bra? frågade Ina. De var för många. Och varför skulle de ha småbarna med sig, det var ju en minneshögtid? Vi glömde salladen.
“Did it go well?” Ina asked. “There were too many of them. And why did they bring the younger children? I mean, it was a memorial service. We forgot the salad.”
translated by Thomas Teal
A short book of great short stories by Tove Jansson, written in her seventies, reflecting on age, art, nature, gender, sexuality and life in general. None of these is long and they are all digestible; none has a sneaky twist but all are humane and insightful. Recommended. You can get it here.
This was both the shortest book acquired in 2017 which I had not yet read, and the non-genre book that had lingered longest on my shelves. Next on those piles respectively are 2024, by Robert Durward, and No, But I Saw the Movie, ed. David Wheeler.
Chapman had been in Harrod’s recently when a salesperson asked him to try a cologne just introduced by Armani. The advertisements made much of the fact that this new fragrance, simply named Amore, combined the most striking elements of other famous Armani scents: a trace of Code, a hint of Mania, overtones of Acqua di Gio, and plenty of Attitude. Chapman thought it quite manly, but to Keats it sounded like nothing but a mélange of incompatible odors. “So”, he sniffed dismissively, “what they’re telling us is Love is Armani’s blended thing.”3
3Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing Title of a 1955 movie, and the theme song by Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain
A fannish tribute to Flann O’Brien’s Keats and Chapman stories, though I am not super convinced that it was worth the effort. You can get it here. The shortest unread book on my shelves that I had acquired in 2017; next on that pile is Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.
Really good climax to a multi-volume Tenth Doctor story, involving the Osirans and all the recurring characters from the previous installments of this sequence. Also includes a less impressive story bringing the Tenth Doctor to London to meet his previous companions (or are they). You can get it here.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
We started the month in France, for a lovely 24-hour trip to a neglected corner across the border for my birthday. We found many things there including the grave of Wilfred Owen.
I found myself at the British Ambassador’s residence twice in a week, once for the Coronation reception and once for Eurovision.
Closer to home, our mayor commemorated the RAF men killed in a wartime crash in the next village to ours, eighty years before.
Back home in Northern Ireland, the local government elections took place and for the first time Nationalist parties got more votes than Unionist parties; I managed to get this data out before anyone else did.
I read 23 books that month, relaxing a bit after the Clarke frenzy.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 32) Johnson at 10: the Inside Story, by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell The John Nathan-Turner Doctor Who Production Diary, 1979-90, by Richard Molesworth American Gridlock, eds. James Thurber and Antoine Yoshinaka Vengeance on Varos, by Jonathan Dennis The Rings of Akhaten, by William Shaw
Poetry 1 (YTD 3) Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles
SF 13 (YTD 100) Creation Machine, by Andrew Bannister Love And Other Human Errors, by Bethany Clift The Hunt – For Allies, by David Geoffrey Adams (did not finish) Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett The Violence, by Delilah S. Dawson (did not finish) Where it Rains in Color, by Denise Crittendon The Race, by Nina Allan A Marvellous Light, by Freya Marske The Shape of Sex to Come, ed. Douglas Hill The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay The Coral Bones, by E.J. Swift The Second ‘If’ Reader, ed. Fredrik Pohl
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 16) Home Fires Burn, by Gareth Madgwick Doctor Who – Vengeance on Varos, by Philip Martin Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, by Philip Martin
Comics 1 (YTD 9) The Fountains of Forever, by Nick Abadzis et al
7,000 pages (YTD 39,700) 9/23 (YTD 66/165) by non-male writers (Giles, Clift, Dawson, Crittenden, Allan, Marske, Serpell, McKay, Swift, Casagrande/Florean) 3/23 (YTD 26/165) by a non-white writer (Yoshinaka, Crittenden, Serpell)
I had not previously read the three most recent Clarke Award winners, but I thought they were all fantastic: The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell, which you can get here, The Animals in That Country, by Laura Jean McKay, which you can get here, and Deep Wheel Orcadia, by Harry Josephine Giles, which you can get here. As homework for this year’s award I also reread The Coral Bones, by E.J. Swift, which you can get here.
Even completist Doctor Who fans can skip Sil and the Devil Seeds of Arodor, by Philip Martin, but you can get it here.
Current Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin Facing Fate: Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al Locklands, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Last books finished Shorefall, by Robert Jackson Bennett What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay Leave Me Alone, by Murong Xuecun
Next books About Time 9, by Tat Wood 2024, by Robert Durward A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford
I voted No Award for this year’s Hugo Award for Best Series. I think the category is a bad idea in principle which is now showing its limitations in practice. My objections are as follows:
The Hugos ought to celebrate the best activity of the previous year, and only the previous year. For some of the other categories (Semiprozine, Fanzine, Fancast), earlier work is taken into account to determine eligibility, but the award is clearly for achievements of the previous calendar year. Best Series is inevitably an award for a multi-year set of activities.
It is impossible for the diligent reader to read all of the work nominated for Best Series in a given year. By giving the award we are deliberately engineering a situation where voters cast their votes based on imperfect knowledge of the finalists.
We are now seeing repeat nominations for series that have been unsuccessful finalists before. I feel sympathy for authors who must feel that they are waiting for their turn, but that’s not the way an awards system should run.
The arguments made in favour of creating the category are now out of date. (See the Minutes of the 2016 WSFS Business Meeting, pages 136-140. I align myself completely with the minority report of Mark Olson at the end.) The proposers in 2016 said:
Looking at Best Novel finalists over the past decade or so, series novels represent a majority of the nominees, yet only a handful of the winners, with later installments particularly disadvantaged. Clearly, the Hugo nominators feel that high quality work is being done in series novels, yet the Hugo voters have a taste for standalone novels, or at least novels that can be approached without any background. This represents a change from earlier eras, when the publishing field was smaller and readers tended to be able to consume a higher proportion of it. In decades past, series novels managed to hold their own against standalones, even dominating the Best Novel category at times.
That was in 2016, the year the first volume of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy won Best Novel. Everywinner of Best Novel since then has been part of a series. Four of the six have been later installments rather than the first book – to name them, Jemisin’s own The Obelisk Gate (2017) and The Stone Sky (2018), Martha Wells’ Network Effect (2021) and Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace (2022). So the taste of Hugo voters appears to have changed again. If anything, it is the standalone novels that could complain of being discriminated against. (Having said that, five of this year’s six finalists appear to be standalones.)
A weaker argument, though one that is sometimes made, for having a Best Series category is that it supposedly reflects the publishing market. The Hugos cannot, do not and should not cover everything that goes on in the genre. They should and usually do celebrate the achievements of the previous calendar year, and that should be as determined by fans, not the real or imagined wishes of the publishing industry.
I voted against ratifying Best Series in Helsinki in 2017, and I would have voted to sunset it if I’d been in Washington DC in 2021. At least the awful amendments proposed in Chicago last year, which would have excluded popular and long-running series and created many headaches for administrators, were rejected. But if there’s ever a move to scrap the category again, I’ll support it. And if there is one thing I can do this year to accelerate the abolition of the category in a future year, it’s to vote No Award.
So, on to my vote in this year’s category.
7) October Daye, by Seanan McGuire. I have rehearsed previously why I bounced off this and don’t need to do so again here.
6) The Locked Tomb, by Tamsyn Muir. I really bounced off the first two books of this series, but surprised myself by liking the first part of the third book, until the action returned to the setting of the previous two and I got lost again.
4) The Founders Trilogy, by Robert Jackson Bennett. The publisher kindly made all three volumes available to voters, and I had time to read two of them before the deadline. Well put together fantasy with a complex magical system, but I preferred his previous trilogy.
3) Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovich. I didn’t read or reread any of these before voting closed, but I really enjoyed the books of the series that I have previously read.
2) Children of Time Trilogy, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I read all three of theses and thought that they were brilliant. Fantastic aliens, good grasp of inter-species and intra-species politics, superb world-building. I hope it wins. (I don’t have strong expectations for No Award.)
1 ) No Award, as explained above.
On the latest Octothorpe, John Coxon makes the point (at 21:30) that this year’s Best Series ballot contains some items – he specifies the Children of Time trilogy, and the first volume of the Founders trilogy – that are better than anything on the Best Novel list. I think that’s true, but it doesn’t change my view about keeping Best Novel and deleting Best Series.
Non-fiction 6 (YTD 64) Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier The Night of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton The Day of the Doctor, by Alasdair Stuart Dispatches from Chengdu, by Abdel LeRoy Charmed in Chengdu, by Michael O’Neal (did not finish)
Non-genre 4 (YTD 21) Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson Death Notice, by Zhou Haohui
SF 7 (YTD 146) The Bruising of Qilwa, by Naseem Jamnia Ocean’s Echo, by Everina Maxwell The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway Shorefall, by Robert Jackson Bennett What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 27) Extraction Point, by MG Harris Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat
Comics 2 (YTD 23) War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al A Doctor in the House?, by Jody Houser et al
5,600 pages (YTD 70,500) 11/21 (YTD 126/288) by non-male writers (Clinton, Kingsolver, Jansson, Jamnia, Maxwell, Shepherd, Sulway, Macaulay, Harris, illustrators of War of the Gods, author and illustrators of A Doctor in the House?) 3/21 (YTD 39/288) by a non-white writer (Zhou, Jamnia, Shepherd) 1 reread (Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor)
352 books currently tagged unread – down 7 from last month.
Reading now Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor Leave Me Alone, by Murong Xuecun
Coming soon (perhaps) Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al About Time 9, by Tat Wood Doctor Who: Earthshock, by Ian Marter Earthshock, by Brian J. Moss The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos, by James F. McGrath A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin 2024, by Robert Durward No, But I Saw the Movie, ed. David Wheeler Politics: Between The Extremes, by Nick Clegg The Road to Amber — Volume 6: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, by Adam Rutherford “Even the Queen” by Connie Wilis Winter, by Ali Smith Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata Cart and Cwidder, by Diana Wynne Jones Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort My Real Children, by Jo Walton One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray et al Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton
We were moved around in buses a lot. I looked out through rows of slanted windows, lined in shoddy chrome, to see sand and cactus swirling subtly in the distance as we made our way up mountain roads. I imagined being a photon, my path perturbed by desert thermals.
I think I got this for F ages ago, and it wasn’t an especially good choice by me for him; it’s by one of the evangelists of virtual reality, and his life story up to the early 1990s, so twenty-five years before the book was actually published in 2017. I have no special interest in VR; my most intense experience of it was three years ago with F in Paris, where Ubisoft, the makers of Assassin’s Creed, had set up a headset for you to experience Notre Dame as it would have been in 1789 (the real Notre Dame still being under repair then and now). And I’ve dabbled a bit in Second Life and the like, but that’s not quite the same.
Like a lot of online reviewers, I found it much more interesting to read about the author’s journey from rural Arizona to Silicon Valley, the tragic family circumstances, difficult educational and business decisions, and mostly failed romances and friendships that got him to the point of selling his startup at a huge profit that has enabled him to do what he likes for the rest of his life. His ideas are less interesting than his story, but it’s easy to skip the more technical (and visionary) chapters.
I still wouldn’t especially recommend it to anyone who doesn’t already have a deep fascination with the social and economic dynamics of innovation; it is an important topic but this is n0ot the way into it. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is another autobiography, A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin.
Stoner is the name he went by, and if he said nice things to Mom, she was all ears. By now she’s been sober long enough to keep her Walmart job through all restocks of the seasonal aisles: Halloween costumes, Santa crap, Valentines, Easter candy, folding lawn chairs. She’s up on the rent and has her drawer full of sobriety chips that she takes out late at night and looks over like a dragon sitting on its treasure. That much I remember. Mom getting home from work and into her cutoffs, cracking open a Mello Yello, sitting on our deck smoking with her feet up on the rail and her legs stretched out trying for the free version of a tan, yelling at Maggot and me down in the creek not to get our eyes put out from running with sticks. Life is great, in other words.
This is Barbara Kingsolver’s rewriting of David Copperfield to today’s Appalachia. I mistakenly got it as a cheerful Christmas present for Anne, and in fact it is crashingly grim reading. Dickens’ whimsy is replaced by gritty reportage of the poverty trap that has hit West Virginia (and many other places); in particular the opioid crisis is depicted in a human and humane and also horrifying way, much more effectively than I have seen in any reportage. It’s totally engrossing but not a cheerful read. Recommended all the same. You can get it here.
This hit the top of three of my piles at once – top unread book acquired last year, top unread book by a woman, and top unread non-genre book. Next on the first of those piles is A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes, by Adam Rutherford, and on the other two it’s Winter, by Ali Smith.
This is a collection of the Dalek comic strips from the magazine TV Century 21, published between 1965 and 1967, a page a week about everyone’s favourite evil metallic pepperpots and the obstacles that get thrown up in their plans to dominate the universe. I found it an unexpected pleasure. There are about a dozen storylines across the run, each reasonably self-contained in the structure of needing each page to have a beginning, middle and end. There are not a lot of women – a slave princess in an early story, a little girl who gets into trouble in a later one – but there aren’t in fact a lot of humans, as the main dynamic in the stories is between the Daleks themselves.
There’s also a dozen pages of introduction setting the scene for the series and printing a 1986 interview with one of the main artists. The only two women mentioned are both fictional – Lady Penelope from Thunderbirds and Maria from Metropolis, but no doubt this reflects the reality.
I must say that this greatly exceeded my expectations, and it seems a lot more mature than the contemporary First and Second Doctor strips that I have seen. Hugely recommended. Sadly it’s out of print, but I’d keep an eye out for it if I were you.
This was my top unread English-language comic. Next on that pile is Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray et al.
I picked this book up from the Little Free Library beside one of the Cubes of Herne in January, and read it on the ferry coming back from Ireland (a month ago now, I have a substantial backlog in my bookblog). It consists of four essays from the Nobel Laureate; it is notable that although the first and the longest of the pieces is about Trinidad, it is Eva Perón who is given top billing in the book’s title and cover. It’s an important book and I will describe each of the four essays briefly.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad” is:
Trinidad in 1971 was his perfect setting. Trinidad, with its oil economy, was rich, with a standard of living equalled in South America only by Venezuela and Argentina. Every consumer comfort was at hand, and Malik was soon pleasantly settled in the country town of Arima, in a newish house with a large garden. But Trinidad was far away. In London, Chicago and Toronto, fund-raising centres, Trinidad could pass as an impoverished island where a black leader, fleeing persecution, and also reacting against ‘the industrialized complex’, might settle down, in a ‘commune’, to constructive work with despairing blacks, who needed only this leadership, and little gifts of money, to get started in black agriculture, black fruit-growing. And, later, even a little black fishing: a trawler (obtainable through ‘contractual relationships with … Schichting-Werft shipyard, Travemuende’) would cost £18,000, but ‘initial feasibility studies indicate that the profits … would exceed £30,000 a month’. Remote Trinidad held this kind of possibility for its enthralled blacks; all that was needed was the leadership.
I was not familiar with this grim story: Michael X, a political activist and effectively a cult leader who had ended up back in his native Trinidad after developing his activist career in London, had two of his followers brutally killed in 1971, and was eventually arrested, convicted and executed for the crimes. Naipaul goes into the rhetoric of Michael X’s particular version of Black Power in detail, which helps us understand why his followers (and others including John Lennon) took him so seriously. Naipaul doesn’t make the connection with Charles Manson, but I must say that I also saw similarities with other homicidal cult leaders before and since.
The third section of “The Return of Eva Perón” is actually about Uruguay rather than Argentina; its second paragraph is:
Now it is a little less frenzied. The Tupamaros — there were about five thousand of them, mainly townspeople from impoverished middle-class families — have been destroyed. The army — essentially rural, lower middle-class is in control and rules by decree. Interest rates have dropped to around 42 per cent, with the taxes; and inflation this year has been kept down to 6o per cent. ‘Prices here don’t just rise every day,’ the businessman said. ‘They also rise every night.’
This is a lyrical and detailed essay about the extraordinary story of Juan and Eva Perón, and how Argentina (and Uruguay) descended into economic and political hell despite being blessed with natural resources and reasonably skilled populations. From the mid-1970s, when Naipaul was writing, it did all look pretty awful; now things look a bit better, but still fragile. He makes the point that Eva Perón would only have been in her fifties, and presumably still dominating the country’s politics, if she still been alive in 1977. He pulls in fellow writer Jorge Luis Borges for some interesting and disturbing observations.
The last two essays are both about the country then known as Zaire and now as the Democratic Republic of Congo. The first, “A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa”, is about the Mobutu regime, which had then been in power for over a decade and had another twenty years to go. The second paragraph of the third section is a report frmo a newly appointed district commissioner:
At the very entrance to the canal [according to the official report in Elima], thousands of mosquitoes cover you from head to ankles, compelling you to move about all the time … After a whole night of insomnia on the Lubengo canal, or rather the ‘calvary’ of Lubengo, where we had very often to get out in the water and make a superhuman effort to help the paddlers free the pirogue from mud or wood snags, we got to the end of the canal at nine in the morning (we had entered it at 9.3o the previous evening), and so at last we arrived at Bomongo at 12.30, in a state that would have softened the hardest hearts. If we have spoken at some length about the Lubengo canal, it isn’t because we want to discourage people from visiting Bomongo by the canal route, but rather to stress one of the main reasons why this place is isolated and seldom visited.
The Mobutu regime eventually collapsed in a war that drew in all nine of the neighbouring countries at one time or another, and in the meantime other African regimes had followed it down the path of brutality and corruption. Naipaul’s analysis of the weaponisation of the cult of personality and the meagre but sufficient resources of state power is brief and forensic.
The final essay, “Conrad’s Darkness”, looks at Conrad’s work as a whole, but at Heart of Darkness in particular. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:
Most imaginative writers discover themselves, and their world, through their work. Conrad, when he settled down to write, was, as he wrote to the publisher William Blackwood, a man whose character had been formed. He knew his world, and had reflected on his experience. Solitariness, passion, the abyss : the themes are constant in Conrad. There is a unity in .a writer’s work; but the Conrad who wrote Victory, though easier and more direct in style, was no more experienced and wise than the Conrad who, twenty years before, had written Almayer’s Folly. His uncertainties in the early days seem to have been mainly literary, a trying out of subjects and moods. In 18496, the year after the publication of Almayer’s Folly, he could break off from the romantic turgidities of The Rescue and write not only ‘The Lagoon’, but also begin ‘An Outpost of Progress’. These stories, which stand at the opposite ends, as it were, of my comprehension of Conrad, one story so romantic, one so brisk and tough, were written almost at the same time.
Naipaul spent a lot more time thinking about Conrad than I have, but comes out in the same place: Heart of Darkness is a masterpiece and the rest of his work is remarkably good.
This was my top unread book by a non-white writer, and you can get it here. Next on that pile is The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
Only a few more of these posts to go; I’ll need to find another topic for regular non-book-blogging, but it’s been fun.
Quite a lot of travel this month, starting with a work trip to Geneva along with my colleague R:
Then Eastercon in Birmingham with Anne, Cambridge for a couple of days, and the a WorldCon planning meeting in Glasgow. I have not mentioned it previously, but on the last night of Eastercon I was struck by a bad IBS attack, I think triggered by the very creamy risotto that I had for dinner at Zizzi, and was incapacitated for the whole of the Monday. The rest of the week was fine, though, with a glimpse of the elusive planet Mercury as I cross Clare Bridge in Cambridge:
And a great picture of the Armadillo that I’m very pleased with.
In Brussels the following weekend, the normally closed Pavilion of the Human Passions was opened up for a couple of days:
And Anne and I finished the month elsewhere in France, but more on that anon.
My most significant blog post was on a 1933 aeroplane bombing, but I also read 32 books, many of them at the tail end of the Clarke submissions pile and which I therefore didn’t persevere with I felt that they were not science fiction, or just not very good.
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 27) The Cyprus Crisis and the Cold War, by Makarios Drousiotis My Family And Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell The Silurians, by Robert Smith? When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, by Paula Fredriksen The Underwater Menace, by James Cooray Smith
SF 23 (YTD 87) Scary Monsters, by Michelle de Kretser Galactic Girl, by Fiona Richmond Stars and Bones, by Gareth L. Powell City of Last Chances, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (did not finish) The Shadow Glass, by Josh Winning (did not finish) Redwood and Wildfire, by Andrea Hairston The Ends, by James Smythe The Coral Bones, by E.J. Swift The Mars Migration, by Wayne M. Bailey (did not finish) New Brighton, by Helen Trevorrow (did not finish) Beyond the Burn Line, by Paul McAuley The Last Storm, by Tim Lebbon The Quickening, by Talulah Riley (did not finish) Hangdog Souls, by Marc Joan (did not finish) A Fractured Infinity, by Nathan Tavares (did not finish) Equinox, by David Towsey (did not finish) Outcast, by Louise Carey (did not finish) Stringers, by Chris Panatier (did not finish) The Thousand Earths, by Stephen Baxter 36 Streets, by T.R. Napper (did not finish) HellSans, by Ever Dundas (did not finish) A Sh*tload of Crazy Powers, by Jackson Ford (did not finish) Plutoshine, by Lucy Kissick
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 13) Erasing Sherlock, by Kelly Hale Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters, by Malcolm Hulke Doctor Who: The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson
Comics 1 (YTD 8) The Weeping Angels of Mons, by Robbie Morrison, Daniel Indro and Eleonora Carlini
6,500 pages (YTD 32,700) 11/32 (YTD 57/142) by non-male writers (Fredriksen, de Kretser, Richmond, Hairston, Swift, Trevorrow, Riley, Carey, Hale, Dundas, χ4) 2/32 (YTD 23/142) by a non-white writer (de Kretser, Hairston)
In among the less impressive Clarke submissions were two of the six excellent books that we ended up shortlisting, The Coral Bones by E.J. Swift, which you can get here, and Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick, which you can get here. I also particularly enjoyed Makarios Drousiotis’ book on Cyprus, which you can get here. I’ll draw a veil over the less good…
Current Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor Shorefall, by Robert Jackson Bennett
Last books finished Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat Foundryside, by Robert Jackson Bennett The Day of the Doctor, by Alasdair Stuart Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway Death Notice, by Zhou Haohui
Next books Facing Fate: Breakfast at Tyranny’s, by Nick Abadzis et al A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay
As previously mentioned, last Christmas I got F a book about the craziest places of Belgium, liberally scattered around the kingdom, and not that many of them within easy reach. I did find one not too far away: the Post-Industrial Pagodas.
These 36 towers were built in 1999, from industrial cable spools, by singer, actor and artist Julos Beaucarne, to channel positive energy into the new millennium. They embodied a poem he had written in the early 1990s, for his album Tours, Temples & Pagodes Post-Industriels:
Le constructeur de pagodes veut toucher le ciel Planter des antennes immenses pour capter les messages Qui viennent du fin fond de la nuit et du bout du jour Il veut que le voyageur s’arrête et regarde soudain se déplier tous les plis de son âme
The pagoda builder wants to touch the sky Plant huge antennas to capture messages Which come from the depths of the night and the end of the day He wants the traveler to stop and suddenly watch all the creases of his soul unfold
Il veut pénétrer la matière même de l’univers Il veut faire signe à toutes les planètes, à toutes les galaxies Il veut lancer des messages, jeter des ponts entre tous les êtres, entre tout le vivant Le constructeur de pagodes, de temples et de tours médite sur la verticalité
He wants to penetrate the very matter of the universe He wants to signal to all the planets, to all the galaxies He wants to send messages, build bridges between all beings, between all living things The builder of pagodas, temples and towers meditates on verticality
Il récupère les matériaux usés dont plus personne ne veut Il les empile à la manière des enfants Petit Poucet, il sème sur son passage des repères géants Et ce faisant, il signe éperdument le paysage post-industriel
He recovers used materials that no one wants anymore He stacks them like children do Like Hop-o’-My-Thumb, he sows giant landmarks along his path And in doing so, he indelibly marks the post-industrial landscape
As the years wore on, the pagodas became increasingly dilapidated, as was always the artist’s intention.
The site of the pagodas is the farm of Wahenge, which has a pleasant but coincidental euphony with Stonehenge, near Beauvechain which is mainly famous for its air base.
It’s not too far off my route to and from the girls in Tienen, so I went to look for it last weekend, and was astonished to discover that the Post-Industrial Pagodas had simply vanished.
taken by me on 17 September 2023
It turned out that there was a simple explanation. In January 2021, eight months before Beaucarne’s death, he agreed with the landowner and the municipality that they would simply burn down the pagodas, leaving only a patch of scorched grass. One mysterious capsule and one surviving spool mark the scene.
also taken by me on 17 September 2o23
But apart from that, the Post-Industrial Pagodas are marked by their absence. Consider yourselves duly informed.
Second paragraph of third chapter (with illustration):
“Squeak, Squeak, where are you?” murmured the girl, nervously biting on her lower lip. She slowly pivoted in midair and stared at the distant earth, a hazy blue globe dangling in an ebony sky. Her brother might never walk on that friendly dirt again. The slender young flight doctor shuddered, de-spite the controlled warmth of her space suit. There was no friendly soil on the moon—nothing but sterile, gray-brown dust, monotonous craters, and saw-toothed mountains the color of rust.
I had picked this up somewhere along with one of my sets of Doctor Who e-books. I didn’t have the Major Matt Mason toy when I was a kid, so missed out on all the fandom around the Mattel astronauts; here we have Major Matt coming to the rescue of a fellow astronaut, whose sister is also on the team as the medic. It turns out that giant space rabbits are Behind It All. You’re welcome. The art is rather nice though. You can get it (for free) here.
This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is the Roger Zelazny collection, Nine Black Doves.
The main function of most birdsong is long-distance communication, either to mark territory or to be sociable. As such it is largely intraspecific; blackbirds sing to impress blackbirds, not buntings. In contrast, social vocalisation, such as coordinating group activity, largely occurs at short range during active flight or foraging, or when settling down for the night or preparing to take flight as a flock.
Following on from Does Anything Eat Wasps? and Why Can’t Elephants Jump?, here are 101 more questions asked by New Scientist readers with answers also supplied by New Scientist readers. There is a whole chapter on why one might want one’s martini to be shaken, not stirred, with accounts from readers of direct experimentation on the options. Otherwise lots of wholesome science stuff. (And no, we won’t ever speak Dolphin; they don’t really have language to the same level that we do.) You can get it here.
This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest on my unread shelf. Next was going to be A Brief History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff, but I realised it was actually a condensation of his two books that I have already read, so in fact next will be Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton.
The second paragraph of the third section of “Beggars in Spain” is:
She had studied the theory of cold fusion at school, and her global studies teacher had traced the changes in the world resulting from Yagai’s patented, low-cost applications of what had, until him, been unworkable theory: the rising prosperity of the Third World; the death throes of the old communistic systems; the decline of the oil states; the renewed economic power of the United States. Her study group had written a news script, filmed with the school’s professional-quality equipment, about how a 1985 American family lived with expensive energy costs and a belief in tax-supported help, while a 2019 family lived with cheap energy and a belief in the contract as the basis of civilization. Parts of her own research puzzled Leisha.
Back when I was first attempting to work through the joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, more than twenty years ago, I had the silly idea of doing them in alphabetical order by title, which meant that this was the second I got to after “Bears Discover Fire” (at that point, American Gods, Among Others, Ancillary Justice and All Systems Red all lay in the future). In 2001 I wrote the following (links have been updated):
I think this was the first work by Kress that I ever read, just around the time that my own daughter was born in 1997. The story begins with the planned conception of a genetically modified child, Leisha Camden, and her “normal” twin sister, Alice, and follows them until their early twenties, so as a new father myself I was gripped from the start. All parents know that their child is the most marvellous creature in the world, of course, and part of the monstrosity of Roger Camden is that he barely acknowledges the existence of the ordinary Alice and concentrates his affection on the augmented Leisha. The dysfunctional family of Camden, his wife who gradually disintegrates, the geneticist who Camden subsequently marries, and the girls themselves, is all too credible and painfully (if sparsely) portrayed; likewise Leisha’s discovery of a new community with the other children born with the same modification that she has. However it is not the main point of the story.
Leisha has been genetically modified so that she does not need to sleep. Along with this most obvious change come other benefits: the Sleepless (for she is among the first of many such children) are more intelligent, more capable, and more content than the Sleepers (as we normal humans become known). As the Sleepless progress to maturity they have to deal with the prejudices that many display against them. The story of prejudice against children who are not just different but who are feared to be superior is an old SF trope, going back at least to 1911 and J.D. Beresford’s The Hampdenshire Wonder. Kress’ triumph here is that she displays a certain compassion for both the ordinary humans who are terrified by the emergence of the Sleepless, and indeed for the isolationists among the Sleepless who want to build a new society for themselves, leaving cut off the rest of humanity. Howwever we are in no doubt that her sympathies lie with those including Leisha Camden who want to maintain a single human society including both Sleepers and Sleepless.
Dealing with prejudice is a hall-mark of Kress’ best work; it is the main theme of her Nebula-winning “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and prominent also in her other Nebula-winning novella, “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”. Her understanding is that many, perhaps even most, will be prejudiced against those who seem insufficiently “human”, but those of us who do not feel that way must stand up and be counted against such bigotry, even if it seems that the odds are stacked against us. It’s a powerful and profound argument. But that too is not the main point of this particular story.
The main theme of the story concerns the responsibilities of those who have favourable positions in society towards those who are less fortunate. The intellectual underpinning of the argument here is a fictional philosopher/scientist called Kenzo Yagai, who has not only invented cheap energy but propounds a moral code based on these principles: “That spiritual dignity comes from supporting one’s life through one’s own efforts, and from trading the results of those efforts in mutual cooperation throughout the society. That the symbol of this is the contract. And that we need each other for the fullest, most beneficial trade.” In a crucial passage where Leisha debates this issue with Tony, an embittered fellow Sleepless, later martyred, he introduces the metaphor of the story’s title:
“What if you walk down a street in Spain and a hundred beggars each want a dollar and you say no and they have nothing to trade you but they’re so rotten with anger about what you have that they knock you down and grab it and then beat you out of sheer envy and despair?” Leisha didn’t answer. “Are you going to say that’s not a human scenario, Leisha? That it never happens?” “It happens,” Leisha said evenly. “But not all that often.” “Bullshit. Read more history. Read more newspapers. But the point is: what do you owe the beggars then? What does a good Yagaiist who believes in mutually beneficial contracts do with people who have nothing to trade and can only take?” “You’re not–“ “What, Leisha? In the most objective terms you can manage, what do we owe the grasping and nonproductive needy?” “What I said originally. Kindness. Compassion.” “Even if they don’t trade it back? Why?” “Because…” She stopped. “Why? Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by just laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything? Be as honest as I know you are.” Leisha put her head between her knees. The question gaped beneath her, but she didn’t try to evade it. “I don’t know. I just know we do.”
Kress’ source for Yagaiism is quite explicitly the philosophy of Ayn Rand, as expressed in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged (famously mocked as Telemachus Sneezed by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in the Illuminatus! trilogy). In one interview, Kress says of Rand: “although there’s something very appealing about her emphasis on individual responsibility, that you should not evade reality, you should not evade responsibility, you should not assume that it’s up to the next person to provide you with your life, with what it is that you need, whether that’s emotional, or physical… [it] lacks all compassion, and even more fundamental, it lacks recognition of the fact that we are a social species and that our society does not exist of a group of people only striving for their own ends, which is what she shows, but groups of people co-operating for mutual ends, and this means that you don’t always get what you want and your work does not always benefit you directly.”
She goes on to draw another contrast in the other direction, between the society she depicts in her own fiction and the society of Anarres in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but I guess this must have more relevance to the expanded, novel version of Beggars in Spain which I have not read. There is an interesting discussion of both Rand and Kress on the everything2.com discussion site. [And it’s still there, almost a quarter of a century later!] The central message of “Beggars in Spain” is that our humanity as individuals is bound up in our obligations to the rest of humanity, and if we forget that, we become less human.
It would be easy to write a didactic and boring story about how we all ought to be nice to each other, even including the two subsidiary themes identified above. “Beggars in Spain” is not that story. We have vivid characterisations of Leisha and her sister Alice, their stepmother the geneticist, and several of the other Sleepless (perhaps the father is a little too monstrous here). Also Kress has a very strong sense of place, with the Camdens’ mansion by Lake Michigan, Leisha’s student environment in Harvard, and the middle America through which she and Alice eventually flee having rescued a Sleepless child from abuse, all depicted convincingly. And there are a couple of beautiful vignettes; a scene where Leisha confronts a pregnant Alice, slightly (deliberately?) reminiscent of the end of Lolita; an earlier scene where the Sleepless kids try a drug that will make them sleep for the first time, with their sense of anticipation – and then disappointment when they all wake up hung over – wickedly portrayed. This story is strongly recommended.
I stand by pretty much all of that from 22 years ago. Two new points jumped out at me. First, the Sleepless kids’ communication, presented as a deeply clever and privileged way of staying in touch across computer networks, is basically a WhatsApp group or a private Telegram channel; the fact that everyone would have access to that sort of networked communication in the future was unthinkable in 2001.
Second, the scene with Alice barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen in the Appalachians resonates backward with Lolita, but also forward with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (review coming soon). Having said that, I do wonder how the daughter of a Chicago millionaire managed to get into a (not very) romantic relationship with an older man from the sticks?
Anyway, I’m glad to say that it has retained its power, a classic case of sf being not just “What if…?” but “My God! What if…?” You can get it here as a standalone novella.
That year Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold won the Hugo for Best Novel, and Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick won the Nebula. For Novelette, the Hugo went to “Gold” by Isaac Asimov, who had just died, and the Nebula to “Guide Dog” by Mike Conner; and for Short Story, the Hugo went to “A Walk in the Sun” by Geoffrey Landis, and the Nebula to “Ma Qui” by Alan Brennert. I remember reading the two shorter Hugo winners but not the Nebula winners. The Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Ray Bradbury Award both went to Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Next up in this sequence is a Connie Willis double: the short story “Even the Queen” and the novel Doomsday Book.
This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging at the end of October 2023. Every six-ish days, I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.
I had two nights away from Belgium that month, a Clarke meeting in London and a work meeting in The Hague. I also enjoyed a massive St Patrick’s Day whammy of Irish Embassy Reception on the evening of the 16th, Northern Ireland representation breakfast on the 17th and the Irish College in Leuven, where it all started, on the evening of the 17th. A couple of days later I attended the screening of a film about Lyra McKee.
Here are two journalists, both with the same first name, at the Irish embassy reception.
With the Clarke deadline closing in, I read 37 books that month, though again I did not finish those that seemed insufficiently science fictional (or insufficiently good) to have a chance of winning.
Non-fiction 9 (YTD 22) Madam Secretary, by Madeleine Albright Management Lessons fromGame of Thrones: Organization Theory and Strategy in Westeros, by Fiona Moore Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins Wordsworth’s French Daughter, by George McLean Harper Kerblam!, by Naomi Jacobs and Thomas L. Rodebaugh William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, by Émile Legouis The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords, by James Mortimer The Kosova Liberation Army, by James Pettifer The Face of Britain, by Simon Schama
Non-genre 1 (YTD 4) Ratlines, by Stuart Neville
SF 23 (YTD 64) The Key to Fury, by Kristin Cast (did not finish) Lost In Time, by A.G. Riddle (did not finish) The Visitors, by Owen W Knight (did not finish) Thrust, by Lidia Yuknavitch Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel Neom, by Lavie Tidhar The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd (did not finish) Luca, by Or Luca Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, by Aliette de Bodard Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Pod by Laline Paull The Best of Ian McDonald Trouble the Waters: Tales from the Deep Blue, eds. Sheree Renée Thomas, Pan Morigan and Troy L. Wiggins The Anomaly, by Hervé le Tellier Glitterati, by Oliver K. Langmead The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan Off-Target, by Eve Smith Children of Memory, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Venomous Lumpsucker, by Ned Beauman Last Exit, by Max Gladstone (did not finish) Speaking Bones, by Ken Liu (did not finish) Ricky’s Hand, by David Quantick The Moonday Letters, by Emmi Itäranta
Doctor Who 2 (YTD 10) Warring States, by Mags Halliday The HAVOC Files: The Laughing Gnome, ed ???
Comics 2 (YTD 7) Revolutions of Terror, by Nick Abadzis, Elena Casagrande and Arianna Florean The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
10,100 pages (YTD 26,200) 17/37 (YTD 46/110) by non-male writers (Albright, Moore, Jacobs, Cast, Yuknavitch, St. John Mandel, Shepherd, Luca, de Bodard, Paull, Thomas/Morigan, Egan, Smith, Itäranta, Halliday, Casagrande/Florean, Bechdel) 7/37 (YTD 21/110) by a non-white writer (Cast, Shepherd, Luca, de Bodard, Paull, Thomas/Wiggins, Liu)
Some really good books this month. From the Clarke submissions, Venomous Lumpsucker (get it here), The Anomaly (get it here), Off Target (get it here) and Children of Memory (get it here) were all excellent. Several good biographies too: Rob Wilkins on Terry Pratchett (get it here), Madeleine Albright on herself (get it here), Alison Bechdel on herself in graphic format (get it here). See also Simon Schama on British portraits (get it here) and the Best of Ian McDonald‘s short fiction (get it here). I don’t need to cover the less good ones, I think.
‘I like to sit with my back to the engine,’ he explained.
I had read this as a teenager, which I went through my Flann O’Brien phase, and approached re-reading it with some trepidation; would the Suck Fairy have visited this collection of excruciating puns based around a totally fictional friendship between John Keats (1795-1821) and George Chapman (1559-1634)?
I’m afraid so. I am sure that over the table in a bar, Flann O’Brien would have told these with gusto, his face barely twitching as he reached the end and his friends collapsed with hilarity. But culture has moved on since his time, especially in Ireland, and a lot of the stories are laboured journeys to an uninspiring punchline. Here is one of the less aged ones:
One winter’s evening Keats looked up to find Chapman regarding him closely. He naturally enquired the reason for this scrutiny.
‘I was thinking about those warts on your face,’ Chapman said. ‘
What about them?’ the poet said testily. ‘
Oh, nothing,’ Chapman said. ‘It just occurred to me that you might like to have them removed.’
‘They are there for years,’ Keats said, ‘and I don’t see any particular reason for getting worried about them now.’
‘But they are rather a blemish,’ Chapman persisted. ‘I wouldn’t mind one – but four fairly close together, that’s rather—’
‘Four?’ Keats cried. ‘There were only three there this morning!’
‘There are four there now,’ Chapman said.
‘That’s a new one on me,’ Keats said.
You see what I mean?
The book also includes the script of Eamon Morrissey’s one-man show based on O’Brien’s work, “The Brother”, where the punchline is that although many claim to have died for Ireland, the barman was born for Ireland (in that his mother distracted a hostile British soldier at just the right moment to save the narrator). It’s a cringeworthy set-up, but it also sparks the interesting thought that there has been very little writing about gender-based violence during the Irish conflicts of the early 1920s. Can there really have been none at all?
This was the non-genre book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves (I don’t think the stories are very sfnal, even if Keats and Chapman lived two centuries apart in real life, and most of the stories are set long after Keats’ time, never mind Chapman’s). Next on that pile is a rather different matter, Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.
Current Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat
Last books finished Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson Ocean’s Echo, by Everina Maxwell The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd Extraction Point, by MG Harris The Night of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith
Next books The Day of the Doctor, by Alasdair Stuart Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor
“Squeak, Squeak, where are you?” murmured the girl, nervously biting on her lower lip. She slowly pivoted in midair and stared at the distant earth, a hazy blue globe dangling in an ebony sky. Her brother might never walk on that friendly dirt again. The slender young flight doctor shuddered, de-spite the controlled warmth of her space suit. There was no friendly soil on the moon—nothing but sterile, gray-brown dust, monotonous craters, and saw-toothed mountains the color of rust.
