George R.R. Martin, with support from John Scalzi and Charles Stross, on the reasons why the next Song of Ice and Fire volume is late and how the fans are Not Being Helpful. I’ve been rather appalled by some of the arrogant and rude comments Martin has been getting from drive-by visitors to his livejournal, and am if anything impressed that his response is relatively civil. I’m sure that behaviour like that makes it more difficult for Martin to get motivated.

Having said which, I too can’t wait for the appearance of A Dance With Dragons…

The Haunting of Thomas Brewster introduces the eponymous Brewster, played by John Pickard who I understand is a soap star, as a new companion to the Fifth Doctor. The story ambitiously portrays a mid-Victorian milieu, and the script conveys the setting very well. Unfortunately there are several killer flaws in the play. The first is the incidental music, which starts out really good but becomes tired through over-use. The second is guest star Pickard as Brewster, who seems unable to tell the difference between commas and full stops in his lines. The third is the rather gratuitous way the Doctor allows other characters to be killed off. So plenty of marks for trying, but it didn’t work for me.

The Death Collectors failed totally to engage my interest, yet more monsters with silly voices and Sylvester McCoy shouting a lot.

By contrast the one-ep story Spider’s Shadow, on the same BF release, seemed to me a really neat time/space paradox with Seven trying desperately to avoid being caught by the bubble as it collapses.

Peter Davison is cruel in the extra tracks of The Boy That Time Forgot: “So imagine my surprise when I saw that they had brought Adric back, only this time he is being played by … an actor!!!” Indeed, Adric survived the crash of Earthshock, and is now in charge of a prehistoric kingdom of intelligent scorpions. But don’t worry, Nyssa, he has decided that you shall be his queen. The Doctor, however, is to be eaten. The story treads on uncertain ground but does it pretty confidently, helped immensely by Andrew “Manuel/prank phone calls” Sachs as the aged and crazed Adric. Unfortunately John Pickard returns as Brewster at the end, but you can’t have everything.

The Doomwood Curse was my favourite of this run. Charley and Six, having visited a far-future library, find themselves caught in the fictional world of Dick Turpin. This is territory Who has occasionally dipped into, most memorably in The Mind Robber, but done with great conviction here, especially by India Fisher who plays Charley Pollard as a gangster’s moll. Excellent fun.

Both Kingdom of Silver and Keepsake seemed to me unusually dull even for Seven/Cyberman stories. Apparently they fit into the continuity of BF’s sequence of Cyberman plays; I might give them another try in that context.

In summary: The Doomwood Curse and The Boy That Time Forgot are good, the others not so much.

Review in NYT.

Good heavens, that was exciting!

In this short book, Economist correspondent Tim Judah has simply put down on paper the basics about Kosovo, up to the declaration of independence about a year ago. I know the author well and I know the subject well, so I may be biased, but it seemed to me a good and pretty neutral guide to the facts about Kosovo’s history, and the problematic future of its relations with the EU and its neighbourhood. (Though I still don’t believe Carla del Ponte’s organ-legging story deserves any airtime – Doug Muir fisked it ages ago.) Recommended for anyone wanting a quick decent guide: I wish there were similar books for Bosnia and Macedonia.

In Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Gould makes a strong and eloquent case that science and religion can and do normally get on just fine; that despite the extremes of creationists on the one side and (though Gould does not name him) Richard Dawkins on the other, in fact most practitioners of both science and religion recognise that they are answering different questions, and are sensible enough to stay out of areas in which they are not experts. I agreed with almost everything in it, and recommend the book to anyone interested in a saner take on the issue than we sometimes get.

This is the translation of The Odyssey by T.E. Lawrence. The narrative is, of course, very dense, as you would expect from transposing epic poetry into prose, and I rather felt that I should read it again some time over a period of weeks, taking one of the 24 chapters each day in several translations. The central narrative has more of Odysseus’ son Telemachus than I had realised – he goes off on an initial quest for his father and then is instrumental in engineering his return to Ithaca. I was also startled by the brutal violence with which Odysseus and Telemachus dispose of Penelope’s suitors and the maidservants. Most of the stories I already knew from other reading, but it was interesting to get a sense of the original.

I got this collection mainly because it had the only Erimem story I had not otherwise read or listened to – “The Gangster’s Story”, by Jon de Burgh Miller. I was not bowled over by it, or indeed by many of the other stories in the collection, which is built around a theme of people whose survival affects the Web of Time and who are therefore removed from history by the Doctor – completely un-Doctorish behaviour, it seemed to me. I did rather like Kathryn Sullivan’s “The Diplomat’s Story”, but otherwise you can give this one a miss.

here.

Does anyone have a suggestion for decent webwriting software? I used to use NVU and then Kompozer but am getting annoyed with them both.

Ramush Haradinaj to mediate in Ugandan conflict?

In Write It When I’m Gone, DeFrank chronicles three decades of interviews with Gerald Ford, from his appointment as Vice-President in late 1973 to a final conversation in late 2006. For most of that time, Ford was old news; he ruled himself (with some bitterness) out of the presidential running fairly early in 1980 and settled down to being an elder statesman. There’s nothing terribly startling in any of DeFrank’s revelations: Ford didn’t like Reagan, but liked Carter even less until they unexpectedly bonded on the way back from Sadat’s funeral; Ford was never really on speaking terms with his predecessor as Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, although they lived very close to each other in retirement; Ford generally backed Cheney and Rumsfeld, his own chiefs of staff, but thought Cheney should have been dropped from the Bush 2004 ticket; Ford and Clinton negotiated about his possibly having a role in the Lewinsky impeachment crisis, but it came to nothing. But in general it’s the account of a journalist’s admiration for a decent chap who didn’t want to be President but accepted the office when it was thrust upon him, and who had few bad words for anyone (except Carter and Reagan, and even then he ultimately relented on them both).

I am on the road this week, and have been listening inter alia to Big Finish’s recent production of three Doctor Who plays originally written for the stage.

Seven Keys to Doomsday, by Terrance Dicks, has the Doctor acquiring two new companions, regenerating into Trevor Martin, and then going on a rather pointless quest to find seven bits of crystal which fit together to form a mystical key. It obviously inspired the Key to Time season a few years later, but I think it looked better than it sounds.

The Ultimate Adventure, also by Terrance Dicks, has Colin Baker, a French companion, and several songs, as at the request of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher they try and rescue the American delegate to the world peace conference who has been captured by Daleks and Cybermen. Unlike Seven Keys to Doomsday, it is not actually bad, but it is on the whimsical side.

The best of the three plays is the earliest, Curse of the Daleks, written in 1965 by Terry Nation. I was amused to note that we begin with convicts on a spaceship which they manage to take control of and bring to another planet where they have to do a deal with the local baddies – the second episode of Blake’s Seven reworks this with surprisingly few changes. Later parts of the plot, with the Daleks’ human stooge reviving them, were recycled by David Whitaker in the first Troughton story, Power of the Daleks. On top of providing the source material for those two excellent later pieces, Curse of the Daleks has a rather good “who’s the traitor” plot, and Nick Briggs does the best linking narration for any of the three plays. Recommended.

I was moderately impressed by the audio original version of this story, but I really liked the book. It is a real shame that Barry Letts has written so few Who novels; his Doctor Who and the Dæmons is one of the best Third Doctor novelisations. It’s an enjoyable romp round the Brigadier’s elderly relative’s Italian castle, largely but not entirely told from Sarah Jane Smith’s pov, with a little bit of coloration from Letts’ own theological speculations. Definitely one of the Missing Adventures to look out for (and thanks, , for sending it to me).

It’s rather weird to hear from one of my former interns that her husband has just been made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Defense at the Pentagon.

I went to Boskone this weekend, and generally had fun. It was my first North American con, and my first really big con apart from the Glasgow worldcon. Various people who I already knew were there – I bumped into an increasingly groggy on arrival both mornings, and a jolly pleasant dinner with , and on the Saturday night, along with others including and Greer Gilman. I caught up fairly briefly with and in passing. Apologies to anyone who the jetlag has caused me to forget.

There was free food in the form of bread, bagels, fruit and cheese at the con suite, which ensured that I didn’t need to try the Westin’s own catering. The dealer’s space was not vast but offered plenty of scope for browsing; I am still looking for a copy of Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time which nobody seemed to have.

I attended several panels on the Saturday and Sunday. The first of these was the Guest of Honour interview, with / Jo Walton talking about writing in the bath, how poetry can sometimes be easier, and in particular the Small Change trilogy (of which I bought the second two volumes and got them signed). I then went on to a panel about the EU, chaired by Vince Docherty, where I found myself getting hacked onto the top table as a panellist. Vince had prepared a PowerPoint intrducing the EU in ten minutes, and there was a reasonably lively discussion. I rounded off the afternoon by going to a talk about Galileo by Mike Flynn, which was very entertaining (“Galileo would have been a flame warrior if he’d been on Usenet”) but overran so I missed the end. The last Saturday even I attended was the launch for James Morrow’s Shambling Toward Hiroshima, complete with clockwork toy giant lizards.

Sunday was a shorter day, as the con finished in the early afternoon, but I attended two great panels. The first of these was on Roger Zelazny, with two of the three editors of the six-volume NESFA complete collection of his short fiction, poetry, and other writings; Melinda Snodgrass chipped in with personal memories of Zelazny. I had, after some hesitation because of their sheer size, bought the first two volumes of the set; I reckoned I would probably get them sooner or later anyway, so might as well get them now. David Grubbs and Christopher Kovacs were very entertaining about the difficulties of chasing down obscure Zelazny writings from various sources; apparently a later volume will feature the Corwin/Dara sex scene cut from The Guns of Avalon, though we are warned not to get our hopes up about its raunchiness.

The final session I went to was on over-rated sf and fantasy books. This one was dominated by Gregory Feeley, who had obviously given some thought to what “over-rated” actually means. It doesn’t really apply to well-known books of yesteryear which might have difficulty getting published as new books today, but which were none the less influential in their own time. Myself I’ve tended to look at those books which have undeservingly won the Hugo (Robert Sawyer’s Hominids), the Nebula (Catherine Asaro’s The Quantum Rose) or both (Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves) but of course these are not really over-rated: a lot of people seem to agree with me that Sawyer and Asaro are genuinely bad writers who happened to strike lucky with the awards procedures, and everyone agrees that The Gods Themselves won its awards based almost entirely on Asimov’s pre-existing reputation. Anyway, the process of thinking about why one book is bad also helps with working out why other books are good.

Thanks to the con committee for an enjoyable time. And to and family for conveniently living close enough to Boston for me to stay there.

Two very interesting books on the nature of how people actually live on Cyprus. Both are now a little outdated for the best of reasons – written before recent positive developments. But both worth reading, particularly Bryant for the wider issues she raises about the project as a whole.

Rebecca Bryant’s Imagining the Modern: The Cultures of Nationalism in Cyprus was strongly recommended to me by a senior Cypriot contact (who admitted however not having read it himself). I will recommend to him that he should give it another try.

Bryant has dug down through the historical records to find the roots of how Christian and Muslim Cypriots came to define themselves as Greeks and Turks, and comes up with a couple of pithy phrases for the present day situation – Greek Cypriots speak of their own “spirit” and seek “justice”; Turkish Cypriots talk of “blood” and demand “respect”. Part of the comfortable myth that Greek Cypriots have of their own history is that intercommunal tensions were created by the British in the 1950s as part of a divide-and-rule strategy; Bryant shows that, at most, the British gave legal form seventy years earlier to a division that was happening anyway.

I was especially interested by her account of education on the island under British rule, where the modernising projects of the colonisers and the colonised collided. The Greek education system in particular prepared children for enosis rather than for sharing the island with their Turkish Cypriot neighbours, and that was an ideology choice which the British rather ineffectually tried to avert. “Where the British sought to create citizens who understood what was right, Cypriots of both communities sought to train their children to know what was true.” (It is a criticism I still pick up from Cypriot commentators today.)

Things are shifting now on Cyprus, but Bryant shows how far there is to travel.

Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History and an Island in Conflict is a set of essays based on papers given at a conference held in 2001, and then published in 2006. Both years were rather gloomy moments for the island, and the pre-2001 work on Turkish Cypriots in particular seemed to me to have dated rather quickly – it would be very interesting to read some research on the effects of the opening of the Green Line, and the change in Turkish and Turkish Cypriot policy; realistically it is too early to read any considered analysis of the swing on the Greek Cypriot side twelve months ago. There are good chapters by both Rebecca Bryant and Yiannis Papdakis, but in both cases much the same material can be found amplified in their books. All the writers pay homage to Peter Loizos, to whom the book is dedicated; my memory of his The Greek Gift, published in 1975, is that it was curiously silent on both Turkish Cypriots and women.

The two standout chapters for me were both largely about Greek Cypriot women – Ann Jepson on gardens, and Paul Sant Cassia on the families of the missing – both gave me insights that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred to me. The collection as a whole is less heavy than Bryant’s book, and probably more accessible to Cyprus newbies.

I admit to buying just one or two books at Boskone, but this was the only non-sf book to add to my catalogue. Well, if anyone should ever assert that my own interest in presidential trivia is in any way peculiar, I can point to ‘s wonderful ranking of presidents ordered by how many states joined the Union during their terms of office (top spot goes to the otherwise obscure Benjamin Harrison, with six) and other superb lists including how many of them were outlived by one (Polk, Garfield, Harding) or both (Kennedy) of their own parents. Anyone who loves presidential trivia will love this book. (This may not be a huge market.)

“We all brought desserts. Roger loved dessert.”

This book was sent to me by the author some time back. It’s a collection of essays of varying lengths about the Jewish traditions of Bosnia (Sarajevo in particular) and of the “Albanian lands”. Most of the essays explore the history of the Sephardim exiled from Spain and Portugal in 1492: while of course the majority ended up further south and east, in Istanbul and especially Thessalonica, Sarajevo and the other major Bosnian towns also became smaller focuses of settlement, and Schwartz looks at the major historical figures and the surviving architectural traces – in one piece, he and a friend attempt to locate the tomb of the apostate false Messiah, Sabbetai Zvi (1626-1676) in Ulcinj in southern Montenegro (Ulcinj is the centre of Montenegro’s Albanian population).

It is a subject about which I knew very little – I’ve met once or twice with Jakob Finci, the leader of Bosnia’s Jewish community, and also sympathised with Ivo Andrić’s Jewish narrator in his short story “Letter from 1920”, who flees the small-mindedness and ethnic divisions of his home town for a life elsewhere. Schwartz is not an Andrić fan, and has a short piece on five great ex-Yugoslav writers in which he ranks Danilo Kiš, Meša Selimović, Miroslav Krleža and Miloš Crnjanski as better than their Nobel-prize-winning conpatriot – I confess I had heard only of the first two, and only knew of Selimović because he features on banknotes from both sides in Bosnia and shared my birthday (though 1910 rather than 1967). More for my reading list…

This came up in recommendations after I read Fage’s History of Africa last year. It starts awfully well, with sections on African geology in the context of continental drift, and on the evolution of humanity in the context of climate change.

From then on I found it a bit patchy. Fage’s book was good on the general ebb and flow of states and cultures; Reader prefers to take particular vignettes, and then is a bit frustrating in how he fits them into the general picture: lots of (very interesting!) material about Ethiopia, very little about Islam (for Reader, most of Africa’s history seems to start with the Portuguese in the fifteenth century); a general focus on the southern part of the continent which means the Horn (apart from Ethiopia) and West Africa (apart from the prehistory of the inland Niger delta, and a later section on Nigeria) get rather neglected, and anything north of the Sahara isn’t covered at all (apart from one early section on the prehistory of the Nile Valley).

There are two overarching themes which Reader does address well and eloquently: slavery and colonialism. Particularly on slavery – he makes a convincing case that the Atlantic slave trade was hugely damaging to Africa’s development, in terms of lost population growth and social harm. On colonialism, he is (I guess rightly) excoriating of the Belgians, and damning also of the British and Germans, but the Portuguese (in the modern era) get off rather lightly and the French are mentioned only really in passing, which I found a little odd.

Anyway, all very interesting, and thanks to those (, , ) who recommended it.

This is a fascinating book. Subtitled “A Search for Redemption in the Face of History”, it chronicles the research of Warren Read, an elementary school teacher from Washington State, into the June 1920 lynching of three black men in Duluth, Minnesota, accused of a rape that had not actually happened. To his horror, Read discovered while doing some online genealogical research that his own great-grandfather was jailed for inciting the riot. His exploration of that hot summer night in Duluth goes in parallel with exploring his own childhood experiences (his own father was also jailed, for raping his step-sister) and teasing out the unspoken parts of his own family’s history. In one particularly moving chapter he visits the home town of one of the lynched men, and gives his own testimony at the local church. It’s actually quite a short book, but passionate in its detailed analysis.

It’s not an area of history that I would normally have sought out, were it not for the peculiar coincidence that the author turned up in one of my occasional googlings for people born the same day as me (26 April 1967), and thus as a result of an internet search I got hold of a book which was itself inspired by an internet search.

This is an interesting literary project for the Whoniverse: a prequel to the career of one of the Doctor’s companions. While I’m sure fanfic has produced speculation on Sarah Jane Smith’s student days and early journalism career, and there is canonical evidence of the Doctor’s encounter with Rose Tyler as a baby, this is the only example I can think of where the pre-Tardis life of a companion has been published between hard covers – indeed, in this case by her creators.

If you haven’t followed the Big Finish series of Who audios, you may not be aware of Erimem, who accompanies the Fifth Doctor and Peri in a dozen adventures (plus one with Peri but no Doctor, a Telos novella, and two short stories in the Short Trips series). She joins Team Tardis in The Eye of the Scorpion as a forgotten female Pharaoh, fleeing internal conspiracy and alien invasion, and departs as the eponymous Bride of Peladon. The Coming of the Queen is the story of a few months in her life when she loses three brothers and her father, becoming consequently Pharaoh in her own right. The story has no sfnal content whatsoever (which must make it almost unique in the Whoniverse).

The story is essentially a murder mystery / political thriller, where the identities of the baddies are obvious from a pretty early stage. It’s not Great Literature, but I think it is fun in its own right, as McLaughlin and Bartlett explore the roots of Erimem’s loyalty and toughness as depicted in the BF audios. I suspect that people who actually know about ancient Egyptian culture will find plenty to complain about, but I am fortunately unburdened by such expertise. I would go so far as to strongly recommend The Coming of the Queen to Erimem fans, and I think even those who haven’t previously encountered her will find it entertaining.

Abraham Lincoln’s first appearance in Doctor Who is a brief extract from the Gettysburg Address in a First Doctor story, The Chase, in which the Doctor and friends are trying out the Space-Time Visualiser which they liberated from the Space Museum in the story of the same title. (They also use the machine to watch the Beatles performing live, and William Shakespeare in a conversation with Elizabeth I.)

My dabbling in spinoff Who fiction has brought me to two other encounters between the Doctor and Lincoln, and I don’t know of any others (though am ready to be enlightened).

Iain McLaughlin’s novella Blood and Hope, in the Telos series of (frankly overpriced) Who novellas, brings the Fifth Doctor, Peri and audio companion Erimem to Virginia in early 1865; they gain the hostile attention of a deranged Confederate officer, but also assist in the reconciliation of one of the many families sundered by the war. The Doctor ends up assisting Lincoln in his famous walkabout in newly captured Richmond. McLaughlin, who invented Erimem in the BF audio The Eye of the Scorpion, rather neglects her here – she is, of course, as an African presupposed to be a slave – and instead looks at the background to his American characters. There are other flaws, but it is a well-meant effort to engage Who fans in the extraordinary events of the era in question. I have been pretty critical of Telos in the past, but this is one of their better ones.

If you ever go to Washington DC, I strongly recommend the small museum in the former Ford’s Theatre building where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln on 14 April 1865. (The museum ticket also includes the house across the road where he died early the following morning.) The building itself has been reconstructed (after Ford’s Theatre went bust, it became a government office which collapsed catastrophicallly, killing many budding bureaucrats), but both on my first visit as a seven-year-old and on my most recent visit at the age of 39 I found it a strangely compelling place.

Unfortunately Robert Ross’s Big Finish play, Assassin in the Limelight, totally fails to capitalise on this setting. I was not wildly impressed by either of Ross’s earlier Six/Evelyn/Knox plays (the one in Edinburgh with David Tennant being a deranged Scotsman, or the one in Brighton with Roy Hudd as Max Miller), and, alas, this is a desperate attempt to fit a time-travel drama about the very real events of this day. My complaint about the villainous Robert Knox remains that his means and motivation are pretty obscure. One of my many complaints about Assassin in the Limelight is that The Talons of Weng Chiang did nineteenth century theatre better, twenty years before (and that too was, er, not without its problematic aspects). The cliff-hanger to an early episode – where a key character is apparently poisoned early on the afternoon of the assassination day – turns out not to matter, because the poisonee was only pretending. The character in question is John Wilkes Booth. Which gives you some idea of the contempt the author is expressing toward the audience.

So, those of you who are interested in both Who and the US Civil War will find Blood and Hope entertaining and Assassin in the Limelight deeply annoying.

I saw a deeply excoriating review of this novel on my f-list in the last week – apologies for not linking, but I am writing this in the Channel Tunnel. I wouldn’t be quite so harsh; it was Austen’s first novel, and she has not managed to quite get the trick of interesting plot or characters, but it’s not actually bad in my view. But I must admit I sped through the second half hoping that there would be a punchline, and was disappointed.

Alas, the 1967 Doctor Who annual is not as good as its predecessor. I remember finding it in an older cousin’s house when I was very young, and being gripped by the first story, “The Cloud Exiles”, in which the Doctor (or “Dr Who”, as he is consistently referred to here) rescues the Ethereals from non-corporeal exile after some initial misunderstandings. On rereading, I still thought it was the best story in the book; the worst is the sole cartoon strip, whose title is “Mission for Duh” (sic). Walter Howarth’s graphics are if anything better than the previous year; the stories, however, are not as good on the whole.

Where Bradbury’s Becoming Somaliland concentrates on the former British colony, now an independent though unrecognised state, Lewis, who has been researching Somali history and culture for five decades, looks at the bigger picture of the failure of the state of Somalia and the pathetic international strategy to try and put things right – a cycle of offering formal international recognition to a series of pseudo-governments with little actual authority and no legitimacy which goes as far back as 1990. Lewis’ book was published late last year, just before the latest round in this expensive project of wishful thinking, but there is no reason to suppose that things will be much different this time. Meanwhile the most democratic regime in the region continues to function moderately well, if without international recognition.

Lewis also pays some attention to the wider regional context, particularly (of course) the Ogaden conflict in Ethiopia – the Ogaden are a Somali clan, and advocates of a Greater Somalia still hope to annex them along with northern Kenya and Djibouti (and I wish Lewis had also written a bit more about those two). And there is the question of geopolitics as well: the British administration of all the Somali areas bar Djibouti during and after the second world war; the Soviet support of the “scientific socialism” of Siad Barre’s regime, which ended after the Ethiopian revolution brought Addis into the Communist camp; the American bombardment of the country in support of Ethiopia’s invasion two years ago in the cause of fighting Islamism (and of course the US and EU are now celebrating the election as president of the same guy they chased out of Mogadishu then).

Lewis doen’t mention the curious fact that Berbera, Somaliland’s main port, has the longest airport runway in Africa at over 4 km – originally built by the Soviets as part of the scientific socialism project, then improved by the Americans as a potential emergency landing strip for the Space Shuttle. Just thought you ought to know.