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.

The Sunday Times has an article finding that Andrew Wakefield faked the research for his 1998 article which found a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The article also points out that as a result of his frightening parents out of taking up the MMR vaccine, the rate of measles in the UK has gone up by more than 2000% and two children died from it last year alone. Further comment is superfluous.

(Hat-tip to .)

A number of you have been linking to the glorious Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks, which is indeed truly teeth-grinding.

I have a humble example of a similar nature from my daily work to entertain you with. I get a regular news summary about country X, which is produced by officials from country Y, which does not officially recognise country X. The news summaries therefore refer to the “president”, the “prime minister” and the “government”, all in quotation marks. Country Y also questions the legitimacy of the “university” in country X, which can lead to amusing references to “students”. Yes, I’ve encountered “students” in my time, too, and not only in country X…

More BF plays, fairly heavy on the Fifth Doctor this time. Most of them pretty good, actually.

The Mind’s Eye is a rather good drama about Peri and Erimem becoming literally entagled in mindwarping plants, whie the Doctor tries to sort out the politics of the mission investigating the planet. Owen Teale and Rebecca Front are great guest stars, and Thomas Sangster appears as Peri’s stepson – both Morris and Bryant get a good chance to show their talents in a different context.

Mission of the Viyrans is out of sequence, in that it’s a single-episode piece on the same CD set as The Mind’s Eye but set after Erimem’s departure. Again we have Peri’s reality being bent, this time by a virus and by the time-travellers fighting it, and some exceptionally good material for Nicola Bryant, but the punchline somewhat weakens the story.

Alan Barnes is always a writer who makes me sit up, so I was looking forward to The Girl Who Never Was. However I was a little disappointed. The elements are great – Anna Massey claiming to be an elderly Charley, Cybermen on an abandoned ship near Singapore, timewarping and decay – but it doesn’t quite gel as well as Barnes at his best.

By contrast, I loved The Bride of Peladon: OK, a substantial amount of it is a retread of The Curse of Peladon, but that is probably my favourite Third Doctor story so it’s not a bad start; and then we have the Osirans as in Pyramids of Mars, as well as Ice Warriors, Alpha Centauri, Aggedor, Arcturans and all. Erimem’s departure is as you would expect (though we have some good misdirection) and Peri promises that she will not leave the Doctor to marry an alien king. I laughed so loud at that line that passers-by were very startled. But you also have Phyllida Law as the royal grandmother, and Jenny Agutter as the baddie, and it’s generally excellent.

Charley Pollard returns to the Tardis in The Condemned, but with the Sixth Doctor rather than the Eighth. They end up in contemporary Manchester, tangling with Anna Hope’s D.I. Patricia Menzies who discovers that her beat appears to be a combination of Torchwood and Men in Black. She is great, and the plot had some good chilly horror moments, but I felt the story was just a little contrived and depending on coincidences.

Yet another good Fifth Doctor play – it’s been a good week or so for my appreciation of Peter Davison. He lands the Tardis in the middle of a greenhouse and gets mixed up with David Troughton being an alien baddie attempting to conquer the world through cuddly toys. Some very nice moments with Timothy West as the deluded toy manufacturer and Roberta Taylor as the companion-who-isn’t.

The Dark Husband was written by David Quantick who apparently is a famous comedy writer. On the basis of this, he should probably stick to that genre; The Dark Husband is pointless rather than funny. OK, the plot just about makes sense, and poor Danny Webb survives playing all three of the main guest characters, and there is just a hint of romantic spark between Ace and Hex, but it’s just not very exciting.

So, all the Fifth Doctor stories in the above list are good (with the exception of Mission of the Viyrans – another single episode one with Five and Peri which is let down by the ending). The rest are OK but not as good as they could have been.

This book’s full title is The Comprehensive UN Sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – Aims, Impact and Legacy, published through the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and it was sent to me by the author, a tall Norwegian who I know from Kosovo.

It’s a pretty good dissection of the sanctions regime in place against the FRY (Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo) from 1992 to 1995, concentrating on its actual effectiveness as a means of achieving its expressed aim, to bring the Bosnian war to an end. Knudsen is damning on this point: the fact that the war lasted for three years after the sanctions were put in place is a pretty good indicator of their success. She also finds little evidence to suggest that the sanctions played much of a role in their unspoken secondary aim – undermining Milošević’s grip on power; if anything, his popularity was greatest when the sanctions regime was at its peak. While she (rightly) does not doubt the fact that Serbia, and Milošević in particular, bear the chief responsibility for the outbreak of conflict in the first place, she points out that the sanctions regime actually enabled a victim mentality among Serbs who became (and in many cases remain) convinced that the wars in Bosnia and Croatia were nothing to do with them.

I drew a couple of useful general points from this. First, that in the wider literature on sanctions, there is very little support for the “naive theory” that if you impose sanctions on a population as collective punishment for the policies of their leadership, they will react by forcing the leadership to adopt different policies (or by installing a new leadership). This was apparently demolished by Johan Galtung with regard to Rhodesia as far back as 1967. There are a few positive cases (including I suppose South Africa) but Yugoslavia is not one of them.

On the whole sanctions are really imposed to satisfy the demands of the domestic electorate among those imposing them, to make it look as if Something Is Being Done, but not Too Much. The reason for the failure of sanctions is often (and certainly in this specific case) because they become the last stop of the policy line – usually a substitute for diplomatic activity rather than an active peace-building move, and particularly pointless if not combined with credible threats of further coercive action, including the use of force.

Not Nick. Or “Nico”. That is all.

I think this was given to me as a Christmas present several years ago; it languished on the shelves for a long time, and finally bubbled to the top of my list yesterday.

Wow. Once I got going, I really couldn’t put it down. It’s a really impressive autobiography, of a woman growing up in Australia before, during and after the second world war, as a child on a remote sheep station (the Coorain of the title, which some diligent Googling locates here), and then at school and university in Sydney, suffering the deaths of her father and brother and the slow decline of her mother. Yet at the same time it’s a story of empowerment and enlightement, of spiritual, intellectual and moral development, as the young Jill realises what it means to be a white woman in Australia, and later to be a white Australian woman in the rest of the world.

Her descriptions of the landscape of western New South Wales are lyrical, which makes her account of the long years of drought that killed her father and their lifestyle all the more gruelling. (Six decades on, things weren’t much better). Then, after the move to Sydney (she was eleven), she is compelling on the human landscape, both of the silent girl from the bush suddenly immersed in the ways of the city, and of the daughter struggling with her mother’s ambitions and her own aspirations. The ending, of course, only points to new beginnings.

I know some of you reading this are Australians by one definition or another: I would be very interested to know how this book was received there. I confess I know very little about the place, despite my four and a half years working for your former foreign minister. While I’ve enjoyed my dabbling in Peter Carey’s novels, I have to say that they did not whet my enthusiasm anything like as much as The Road from Coorain has.

From the unread books shelf between Forbidden Acts, a horror collection edited by Nancy Collins, and John Coulthard’s graphic treatment of The Haunter in the Dark.

I first read this back in March 2000, on my way back from my first ever visit to Kosovo, on the recommendation of some American friends working there. It remains a good read; one of the effects of having seen the films, of course, is that it’s now impossible to read Hagrid or Snape without hearing Robbie Coltrane or Alan Rickman in your head.. (Let alone Radcliffe, Watson or Grint.)

Indeed, one ability Rowling displays here which she rather let slip in some of the later books is the skill of telling a thrilling story with hints of the historical background and wider world of wizardry in a mere 220 pages. It is a good tale, engagingly told.

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Pope not infallible – Vatican source.

Sex in space!!!!!!!!! (Hat-tip to .)

Google latitude – please add me!!!! (I’m not going to gratuitously send out invites.)

Wii Fit – the truth. (Hat-tip to .)

OK, off for lunch with quarsan and Zoe.

This Telos novella is another of those attempts to marry the Whoniverse with detective fiction and occult forces, which can be done brilliantly (All-Consuming Fire, where the Doctor meets Sherlock Holmes and the Cthulhu mythos), tolerably well (The Unicorn and the Wasp, where the Doctor meets Agatha Christie), or not so well, as in this case, where Andrew Cartmel attempts to channel William Hope Hodgson. I haven’t read any of Hodgson’s stories featuring his mystical detective Carnacki; Hodgson inserts him here into a country-house murder mystery which turns out to be the result of enraged Asians using mystical powers against their colonial masters. As I have said elsewhere, one has to ask whether this is such a bad thing? As it is, the book is a pretty egregious example of what we now call cultural appropriation fail. It’s not even a particularly compelling portrayal of the Second Doctor and Zoe (Jamie spends most of the story unconscious). Once again, I feel Telos have discharged their editorial responsibilities rather too lightly.

Tigers in the snow.

(Hat-tip to someone with very good taste who posted this in a locked entry.)

I have loved this book since I read it for the first time as a teenager attending a convent school. It won the Hugo in 1961, and traces the rise and renewed fall of human civilisation after a nuclear holocaust in three snapshots of crucial moments in the history of a monastery, the resting place of much of human knowledge which has otherwise been lost (in an anti-intellectual reaction to the original war). It does not wear its learning lightly and I am glad that there is a reader’s guide readily available.

How things have changed since the late 1950s! On the one hand, we no longer accept the inevitability of the destruction of civilisation by nuclear war (which Miller has happening not once but twice). The Cold War seemed inevitable and unescapable in 1959, and indeed for most of the next three decades. We have different concerns now.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine a serious writer today taking such a positive view of the Church. Benedict XVI is very different from John XXIII; the Vatican has boxed itself in politically. There is a greater tension now than then between religion and science, thanks to the foolishness of the religious right on the one side and the determination of Richard Dawkins to miss the point on the other; Miller’s understanding of the Church’s role in the Dark Ages has itself been weakened (though not totally disproved) by later scholarship. And Miller is able to largely ignore sex and women in his novel, which I think would be impossible for anyone writing about the Church today.

For all that, it’s a great book, and rightly won the Hugo in 1961 (of its rivals, I’ve read Budrys’ Rogue Moon and Anderson’s The High Crusade) Miller explores faith, history, tradition, political engagement, the advancement of science, and grace; and does it all with a wry and sympathetic humour. The Wandering Jew who pops up from time to time in the narrative is thought by some romantics to have been inspired by Judith Merrill, but clearly comes from many sources (and is occasionally the author’s own viewpoint). And there is the continuing enigma of Mrs Grales at the end.

It is sad that this was basically the end of Miller’s literary career. He seems to have agonised for thirty-five years over Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman before ending his own life, and never published another story.