Nona didn’t want to be just good-looking and dumb; she wanted to be useful. She was dimly aware that she was not what anyone had wanted. This was why she had gone out and got herself a job, even though it wasn’t a paying one.
I completely bounced off the previous two books in this series, both of which were Hugo finalists. But to my surprise, I started off really enjoying this one, as the title character tries to put together her lost memories in a dangerous and violent society not too far from our own. But it lost me again at the end; once she returns to the world of Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, it became boring and confusing, and also there’s a parallel narrative thread which wasn’t integrated into the plot at all, as far as I could see. You can get it here.
5) The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The offices for KPS the name of the organization on the card Tom gave me were on Thirty-seventh, in the same building as the Costa Rican consulate, on the fifth floor. The office apparently shared a waiting room with a small medical practice. I had been in the waiting room for less than a minute when Avella came to get me to take me to her personal office. There was no one else in the KPS office. I guess they, like most everyone else, were working from home.
Very readable and engaging story which I read to the end, a parallel universe with Godzillas; but as usual with Scalzi, all of the characters sound exactly the same (and indeed exactly like Scalzi himself in real life) and the social commentary is paper thin. You can get it here.
4) Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree
Second paragraph of third chapter:
The hob hauled in his box of tools and placed it inside the big doorway.
By a well-known gaming figure, this is about an Orc warrior who decides that she will set up a coffee shop in a fantasy city. There are hilarious capers as she encounters jealous enemies, magical interference with the brewing process (both positive and negative) and love. I honestly don’t think it’s very deep but it’s good fun. You can get it here.
3) The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Her grandmother had taught her that, when Tesla’s rage turned a room incandescent red, the best thing to do was to stay very, very still. The time her elementary school science teacher had marked her correct answer anout the most recent supernova as wrong “because it wasn’t in the textbook” had impressed in Tesla’s mind how effective that stillness could be. It was also the first time she used any version of “I want to speak to the manager” when she asked to go to the principal’s office in a voice that was, in hindsight, too cold and flat for a ten-year-old.
This was very interesting – a detective novel set on an Earth to Mars space cruise. Intricate plotting, lots of good stuff about gender diversity and invisible disabilities, and a very cute dog. And cocktail recipes. I was not quite sure about the ending, though. You can get it here.
2) Nettle and Bone, T. Kingfisher
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I saw you,” said the voice. She squinted against the light and saw the speaker. A man. Perfectly ordinary looking, in the gray-brown garb that everyone wore, here on the edge of the desert. There was nothing that stood out about him, except that he was shouting at her.
As usual with Ursula Vernon, a cracking good read: it’s about a discarded princess who goes on an epic fantasy quest with a gang of unlikely henchbeings. Lots of funny lines and social commentary. Very enjoyable. You can get it here.
1) The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Melquiades claimed the mere thought such a thing might be possible was sacrilege: holiness could not reside in a flower or a drop of rain. Offerings to spirits were the devil’s work.
I thought this was really interesting, a reframing of H.G. Wells in the context of the historical Maya resistance to Mexican rule in the Yucatan. There was a twist three quarters of the way through that I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Not especially excited about any of these, but this one gets my vote. You can get it here.
I remember watching and hugely enjoying The Stones of Blood when it was first broadcast in 1978. I’ve come back to it several times and it retains its charm. When I came back to it in 2008, I wrote:
The Stones of Blood was one that I remembered fondly from first time round, and I liked it again on re-watching three decades later. Perhaps, now that puberty is behind me rather than yet to come, I appreciate Mary Tamm’s costumes as Romana all the more. But of course I also have a fascination with megaliths, and this is the only broadcast story that really uses them (though see also the SJA story The Thirteenth Stone). And of the three stories featuring an ancient cult in England within a few years of 1980, this is the only one that really pulls it off well (the other two being Image of the Fendahl and K9 and Company).
When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:
We are back on firmer ground [after The Pirate Planet] with The Stones of Blood. This just shows the difference that a decent plot (as opposed to a decent script, which Adams was capable of doing) and good casting and direction can make, though unfortunately we are now slipping into Romana as screamy girl rather than smart aleck, which is a shame, especially as the story has two excellent female leads in Beatrix Lehmann and Susan Engel. (I must also add that the viewing experience on DVD is greatly enhanced by the extras, which include a documentary with Mary Tamm exploring the Rollright Stones where it was filmed.)
It’s a story of two halves, Satanic cults (as previously seen in Image of the Fendahl and The Masque of Mandragora) and then the abandoned prison spaceship with the ruthlessly homicidal justice machines. The story wobbles a bit at times – Beatrix Lehmann, who died a few months after filming, is notably shaky on some of her lines – but stays just the right side of the quality divide. The location filming around the stones is particularly memorable, (including particularly K9 on one of his few field outings) and well blended in with the studio scenes. I am really looking forward to the new novelisation by David Fisher, the author of the original script; the original Terrance Dicks novelisation is workmanlike but not terribly memorable, but Fisher’s two previous novelisations of his own stories – The Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive – are particularly good, among the best Fourth Doctor books and certainly better than the TV originals.
Rewatching it again, I liked it a bit more if anything; it clearly too Beatrix Lehmann a couple of scenes to get comfortable with the situation but once she gets in the swing, she is great. And the monstrous Ogri are depicted as pretty horrifying even though we see very little of what they actually do to people (apart from the unfortunate lady camper). I also liked the clues that the segment is around somewhere nearby, which I picked up on more than on previous watches.
Unusually, though not uniquely, there are two different Target novelisations of the story, the first being a rather workmanlike effort by Terrance Dicks. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
Romana straightened up, releasing her end of the tape. A sudden loud cawing sound made her jump. A big black bird was perched on the stone above her head. Romana jumped back. ‘What’s that?’
A longer novelisation by the story’s original author, David Fisher, was released on audio a few years back and is now available in book form. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
The figures pushed back their hoods, revealing themselves to be Mr de Vries, a plump man sporting a wisp of a beard on his chin, and Martha Vickers, a middle-aged lady with the face of a discontented bulldog. She was a resident of the nearby village of Bodcombe Parva, and a member of the local Women’s Institute. Her fellow members would have been astonished to see her there, because she was known to be non-religious and only sang ‘Jerusalem’ under protest. In fact, ever since meeting Mr de Vries a couple of years ago, she had been a pillar of his Druid circle, gradually initiated into the inner mysteries of the BIDS. She used to hunt in her younger days, and unlike some of the other group members was not disturbed by the sight of blood. Hence her presence at all the sacrifices.
Earlier this year the BBC released a new novelisation of an Old Who story – David Fisher, who wrote the original TV story The Stones of Blood, has now converted it not to a print novel but to audiobook format, read with great gusto by Susan Engel (who played the villain of the piece on screen) with John Leeson doing K9’s lines. I had been looking forward to this with hopeful enthusiasm, as Fisher’s novelisations of his other two stories are among the best of the Target range.
I am very glad to say that I was not disappointed. The audio is about twice as long as the original series (four hour-long CDs), and Fisher has bulked out the material with lots more character background and atmosphere than was possible on screen – the full story of the campers gruesomely slain by the Ogri, for example, and various brazen but humorous infodumps. There are lots of decent sound effects as well. Very highly recommended.
I also went back and reread Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation of the story for comparison. It must be a lot shorter than Fisher’s new text. I notedof it three years ago that it is “a standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment, somewhat flattening a rather good story” and I found no reason to change my views. I did think Dicks handled the climax of the story with some finesse, but the rest it pretty thin.
The print version is topped and tailed by some lovely personal reminiscences about Fisher by his son Nick Fisher and by the BBC Audio commissioning editor Michael Stevens. It remains a good read.
As my regular reader knows, I myself am pretty interested in megalithic sites and in their mythology. Katrin Thier, the author of this monograph, apparently shares my interest and has given us a good chunky read with no less than seven chapters, not counting introduction and afterword. There’s plenty to say about this story and where it fits in British popular culture.
An introduction sets out Thier’s stall, reviewing the previous careers of writer, director and guest cast and describing the ‘folk horror’ and Gothic modes, and making a link to Irish independence,
Chapter 1, “The Stones”, starts with the bold proposition that “the main guest stars in The Stones of Blood are the King’s Men at Little Rollright in Oxfordshire, playing the Nine Travellers.” Thier reviews the cult of medievalism, especially around the Rollright Stones themselves, and looks at the origin of the Ogri.
Chapter 2, “The Druids”, reviews what is really known about the Druids and the Gorsedds.
Chapter 3, “Megalithic Afterlives”, looks at the scientific investigation of megalithic monuments and how it has been reflected in popular culture (including The Goodies episode “Wacky Wales”, which features Jon Pertwee as a homicidal cultist). Its second paragraph is:
When the Doctor explains to Romana that the circle is a ‘megalithic temple-cum-observatory’, he expresses an interpretation widespread in the 1970s, suggesting that the prehistoric builders of these monuments were not simple undeveloped countryfolk, but were in fact highly sophisticated, maintaining a class of scientists to rival those of the ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. The evidence for this was seen in the way many of these monuments seemed to be laid out to allow astronomical calculations. The study of this idea now called archaeo-astronomy (although ‘astro-archaeology’ is also sometimes found, reflecting the different emphasis assumed by different scholars). The idea arose partly out of the well-established observations that some of the major monuments interact with points on the sun’s annual circuit, especially the solstices, and a simple explanation for this is that the monument points to the event it is used to celebrate.
Chapter 4, “The Women”, explores the fact that the two main guest stars are women and that Romana rather than the Doctor carries a lot of the plot. This ties into Graves and Mallory, of course. A nice note – although on screen, Beatrix Lehmann is older than Susan Engel who in turn is older than Mary Tamm, Professor Rumford is the youngest of the three characters, a mere 70ish, whereas Romana is in the first half of her second century and Cessair of Diplos is thousands of years old. (Cessair is a genuine if obscure Celtic figure, but should of course be pronounced with a hard ‘c’.)
Chapter 5, “‘To Wit, a Celtic Goddess'”, looks more deeply at the goddesses – the Morrigan, Nemetona, the Cailleach, Ceridwen and the origin of the Great Seal.
Chapter 6, “Mere Mortals”, looks at the origins of Vivien Fay / Cessair’s other identities. I love this coincidence: the site of the Nine Travellers was supposedly owned at one time by the Little Sisters of St Gudula. St Gudula of course is the patron saint of Brussels, but is also the name of a key character in Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, who in the BBC’s 1966 TV adaptation was played by… Beatrix Lehmann!
Chapter 7, “Leaving Earth”, looks at hyperspace, slightly jarring with the themes of the previous six chapters (as indeed the hyperspace parts of the story jar with the rest).
An afterword, “Reithian Gothic?”, points out that the story is really quite informative about megalithic sites and lore, and would have sent the curious viewer off to find out more. It certainly fed my own interest, both on first watching at eleven and since.
This is a good analysis of a good story, even if it’s light on the production details which I usually enjoy hearing about. You can get it here.
Anders Johannsen, captain of the first human starship, tossed and turned in bed trying to find the sleep he so desperately needed, after days of insomnia and stress. Losing the battle as the shouts of his bridge crew reverberated through his mind.
Third in a self-published series. Badly written and incomprehensible. 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.
Only one trip outside Belgium at the start of this year, to London where unexpectedly I saw Noises Off. Within Belgium, F and I had a great excursion to the Cubes of Herne:
Non-fiction 9 God is No Thing: Coherent Christianity, by Rupert Shortt Diary of a Witchcraft Shop 2, by Trevor Jones and Liz Williams Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Horror of Fang Rock, by Matthew Guerrieri Battlefield, by Philip Purser-Hallard The Karmic Curve, by Mary I. Williams Juggle and Hide, by Sharon van Ivan Representing Europeans, by Richard Rose Complexity: A Very Short Introduction, by John H. Holland
Non-genre 2 The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin (did not finish)
Plays 1 Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, by Frank McGuinness
Poetry 2 Metamorphoses, by Ovid tr. Stephanie McCarter Tales from Ovid, by Ted Hughes
SF 22 The Circus Infinite, by Khan Wong Fugue for a Darkening Island, by Christopher Priest All the Names They Used for God, by Anjali Sachdeva “The Mountains of Mourning” by Lois McMaster Bujold Full Immersion, by Gemma Amor The Stars Undying, by Emery Robin (did not finish) The Chosen Twelve, by James Breakwell Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez (did not finish) Mercury Rising, by R.W.W. Greene (did not finish) The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo At The Edge Of The World, by Lord Dunsany The Immortality Thief, by Taran Hunt Wormhole, by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown Death Draws Five, by John J. Miller Appliance, by J.O. Morgan The Kaiju Preservation Society, by John Scalzi The Transfer Problem, by Adam Saint (did not finish) Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugrešić Upgrade, by Blake Crouch The Perfect Assassin, by K.A. Doore Stray Pilot, by Douglas Thompson (did not finish) The World Set Free: A Fantasia of the Future, by H.G. Wells
Doctor Who 5 Doctor Who: Galaxy Four, by William Emms Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii, by James Moran Rise of the Dominator, by Robert Mammone Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who: Battlefield, by Marc Platt
Comics 4 Alternating Current, by Jody Houser et al. Sin Eaters, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko Neptune – Épisode 1 by Leo Neptune – Épisode 2 by Leo
9,900 pages 17/45 by non-male writers (Williams, Cheney/Lofgren/Murphy/Luria, “Williams”, van Ivan, Zevin, McCarter, Sachdeva, Bujold, Amor, Robin, Enriquez, Vo, Hunt, Ugrešić, Doore, Houser et al, Melo) 5/45 by a non-white writer (Thompson/Aguilar/Murphy, Zevin, Wong, Sachdeva, Vo)
Malik watched. “You address me as Ataba and yet you disrespect my rules,” he said.
It just seemed to me a slightly above average YA novel, and we never learn the basis for the colourful rain. You can get it here.
More detail: I’m all for Afrofuturism, but IMHO this just isn’t a very good book. It’s a coming-of-age story where a young black woman overcomes (some of) the sources of her people’s historic oppression and learns many important things about life. Mostly in the last fifty pages.
The worldbuilding is vestigial – I got more info from the back cover about the set-up than I did in the first hundred pages. I can see where the author is going with the notion that this is a culture where the blacker your skin is, the more beautiful you are considered to be, but it seems to me that this misses an important point about not judging people by beauty in the first place; and the protagonist’s struggle to overcome disfiguring scars is rather problematic.
In addition, on page 103, eight high-profile prisoners escape by simply walking out of a room in plain sight of their captors and stealing a nearby spaceship. I’m sorry, this is ridiculous.
In addition, I am bothered by the uses of “Mecca”. The crucial serum is given this name by a character who says (p 101) that “It’s a term I heard in a viewer show about Earth. It means the promise of something good.” Well, it doesn’t really, but I’d have been happy to let that slip if we didn’t have the (white) Toth race presented on p. 163 with the comment “they allowed expatriates and had turned their world into an interplanetary mecca”. This bothered me for a couple of reasons:
1) it’s jarring that the characters in the book have only the haziest idea about the real Mecca, but the omniscient narrator knows all about it as a metaphor.
2) having said that, if you describe a place as a “Mecca”, in general you reference a common activity or interest for the people visiting there (“The Vanilla Bar in Manchester is the Lesbian Mecca of the North”, Ta-Nehisi Coates says “my only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University”). But here we are given no such sense of the Toth world being a centre of anything other than travel.
In addition, the asteroid where much of the second half of the book takes place is equipped with a mild atmosphere and running water, like the asteroids in Le Petit Prince. In reality, asteroids have vestigial or no atmosphere and very low gravity. Again, if it was a better book overall I’d stretch a point here, but I’m not feeling merciful.
In addition,”A plea gushed from her mouth” (p. 201). Oh come on.
I appreciate that it’s the author’s first novel, and having read up on her background I can see where she is coming from and why she made some of the choices that she did. I don’t think it’s taking the piss. But I don’t feel that Where it Rains in Color really is up to the mark.
Second paragraph of third essay (Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from “The Lord of the Rings”: A Textual Excursion into the “History of the “The Lord of the Rings””):
We know about these rejects and false starts because Tolkien was a pack rat. He neither burned his rejects nor threw them in the trash; he saved them. Just about all of the drafts and manuscripts for The Lord of the Rings are preserved at the Archives of Marquette University, and a detailed narrative account of the slow crafting and polishing of the tale was stitched together by Christopher Tolkien in the four volumes of “The History of The Lord of the Rings,” a subseries of the 12–volume History of Middle-earth. The volumes are The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, The War of the Ring, and Sauron Defeated; the Appendices are treated separately in The Peoples of Middle-earth, and will not be discussed in this paper.
I’m not sure that I’ve ever met David Bratman in the flesh, but he was one of those who kept the faith with Livejournal until quite late in the day, and indeed posted a lengthy and well-argued rebuttal to my foolish assertion that Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring is Any Good At All.
I was tipped off to this book of essays by File 770, and grabbed it immediately. I’m a sucker for any serious Tolkieniana, and what I particularly liked about the essays collected here is their chronological scope, from a time before The Silmarillion had been publish to nearly the present day. The shape of the scholarly field has changed a lot in the meantime a there are several telling anecdotes about the early days. If I had to pick two of the Tolkien pieces that really struck me, I think they would be the Top Ten Rejected Plot Twists from The Lord of the Rings, and the exegesis of Smith of Wootton Major.
The other essays include four pieces about the Inklings (two on C.S. Lewis, one on Charles Williams and one on their links with the Pacific), and several on other fantasy topics, including a fascinating piece on Lord Dunsany as a playwright, and a standup encomium of Roger Zelazny. There is also a critique of the Peter Jackson films written presciently before they had actually been released.
Clara was twenty-eight years old and, for the past few years, she’d been mixed up with a suspicious gentleman in a blue box who hopped periodically into her life and caused varying degrees of chaos.
I did not write up the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion at the time of broadcast, though I did note that it was my favourite two-part story of Series 9 (though my favourite Capaldi story remains Heaven Sent, also from Series 9). I enjoyed it – there’s some necessary preachiness about the Other, and immigration and terrorism, some very good skullduggery by villains who can look just like you, and some excellent horror in everyday life. The scene of the plane being brought down by a hand-held missile is a bit too close to the bone for me; several friends of friends died when the Russians destroyed MH-17 in a similar way.
The novelisation is a good competent screen-to-page job, adding a bit more background about the Zygon Bonnie (who used to have a boyfriend called Clyde, who looked like Danny Pink). There are a couple of footnotes citing other DW novelisations, including one quoting a books called The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, for which you will search bookshops in vain. At my reading pace it’s quicker to read the novelisation than rewatch the story, and it’s well enough done. You can get it here.
I was about to get out of the car, but my payment and location would be traceable. I told it to drive on and it took me a couple of miles south. I got out, doubling.
Started it three times and failed to finish the first chapter. Eventually got to page 50 and put it down. You can get it here.
But in the evening, on the way to church, the Frobishers and their guest crossed the market-square as his string of boys marched along the west side. And the guest was arrayed in a gay new dress, as if it was already Easter, and her face set in its dark hair came with a strange effect of mingled freshness and familiarity. She looked at him calmly! He felt very awkward, and was for cutting his new acquaintance. Then hesitated, and raised his hat with a jerk as if to Mrs. Frobisher. Neither lady acknowledged his salute, which may possibly have been a little unexpected. Then young Siddons dropped his hymn-book; stooped to pick it up, and Lewisham almost fell over him… He entered church in a mood of black despair.
Another unexpectedly enjoyable Wells novel, a young man who finds that he has to make a choice between two women having already married one of them (not a situation that Wells himself was unfamiliar with), at the same time as dealing with embourgeoisement and the tension between ideals and reality. Quite short, totally credible, would probably make a terrible film. You can get it here.
This was top of my list of H.G. Wells novels; next on that pile is The New Machiavelli.
Paved alleyway, close on all sides, the Old Quarter. The men at the bia hơi she’d just left watched her go, sullen, red-eyed. The heat beating down, worse than usual, night but still unbearable, air thick. Tempers on edge, the aftermath of a Chinese crackdown the week before. A prism grenade thrown into a high-end restaurant popular with Chinese military; two dead officers, two dead waiters, a dozen injured. Not the most notable of attacks, except one of the dead officers was a general. So there were raids and arrests and bodies turning up, young men and young women, tortured and aired out and worse. Everyone an informant, everyone Việt Minh, no one able to talk or trust.
Current The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd “Doctor Who: Doom’s Day” Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent
Last books finished Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir DALEKS, ed. Marcus Hearn Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al
Next books Extraction Point, by MG Harris Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway
You kindly asked me to contribute my thoughts on social media in the Brussels bubble following the decline of X/Twitter. I’m afraid I’ve missed your deadline – first week back after the hols – but you’re welcome to quote from the below anyway. I can’t speak for the Brussels bubble, I can only speak for myself.
X/Twitter is still going, but feels very much on life support. There have been some improvements since last October – most notably that the length limit for Tweets (as I still call them) has been drastically increased. I notice also that engagement seems to be creeping up again after cratering a few months back. But I get the sense that the ownership cares very little about providing a good user experience, and it feels like it’s just a step away from becoming MySpace. As Hemingway put it, the end comes in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
I was a fairly early adopter of Mastodon, but I am increasingly frustrated with it. The lack of a search function – which is entirely deliberate – removes a lot of the point of social media for me; I want to find out what other people are saying about the political crisis in Grand Fenwick, and if people are talking about it on Mastodon, I won’t see it if they are not in my feed – or even if they are, and I happen to miss the twenty minutes when their toot about it is top of my screen. I am hanging on, because there are rumours that this will be fixed, but I feel it’s not being designed for people like me.
Bluesky is much more promising, though I have been there for only a couple of weeks. It’s easier to Find Good Stuff, and the tone of discourse is noticeably more civilised than on Twitter. However so far, it’s much more useful and interesting for my cultural interests (particularly science fiction) than for following politics. Perhaps this is a critical mass issue, and if in particular Bluesky can market themselves in non-English-speaking countries, we may see an uptick in political relevance for my local interests.
LinkedIn, that venerable beast, seems to me to be the winner for now of the decline in Twitter, at least as far as my professional interests are concerned. I personally find it rather an annoying platform – you have no idea of how the algorithm decides what you want to see, you get little information about how successful your own posts have been. But on the other hand, an increasing number of stakeholders are posting important content there – not just their own thoughts, but reblogging others. And, again, the tone of discourse is markedly more civilised and professional than on Twitter. Discussions on LinkedIn are very different in feel from Twitter threads, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Facebook and Instagram continue as ever, mainly as places where I read personal news and views from friends and look at their holiday photos respectively. Facebook has much less relevance for my work life than ten years ago, and Instagram never had much at all. Let’s see what happens when and if Threads ever comes to the EU.
And finally, we of a more venerable generation are getting completely left behind by the young ‘uns using TikTok. I know that there are concerns about its use of data, but there’s already a clear and growing demographic who are there and nowhere else. I myself featured briefly in a TikTok last month; probably not for the last time.
It’s all a work in progress, and I think my prediction is that LinkedIn will continue to grow at Twitter’s expense, and that none of Threads, Bluesky or Mastodon can become what Twitter once was (and neither can Twitter). But who knows?
Edited to add: I was not in fact too late for H’s deadline, and his piece quoting me and others is here and here:
Not too much commentary here: I know what I like and what I don’t like, and I also know that my tastes don’t always correspond to the wider electorate.
Best Fan Artist
Slightly surprised here that none of the finalists is living in China – this is often a low-turnout category at nominations stage. Anyway, here we go:
6) Orion Smith
Sorry, this didn’t do much for me.
5) España Sherriff
Not much to judge from in the packet.
4) Iain Clarke
I generally like his stuff a lot, but I liked other submissions more this year.
3) Alison Scott
This is the most interesting piece, a moody tribute to Jan Pieńkowski (partly AI-generated).
2) Laya Rose
This was the only art in the packet that really grabbed me.
1) Richard Man
Very unusual to have a photographer in this category, but his series of portraits of leading figures in the SF community is very charming and evocative.
Best Professional Artist
A much stronger Chinese presence here, some of it of really gorgeous quality.
6) Paul Lewin.
Only one piece submitted, and it’s OK, but others are better,
5) Kuri Huang
Gorgeous use of colours and movement. Not quite so sure about the human figures.
4) Jian Zhiang
Breathtaking future machinery, reminiscent of Chris Foss. A bit sterile.
3) Enzhe Zhao
More future machinery, but this time with a little bit more humanity to put it in scale.
2) Alissa Wynans
Nicely framed studies of human or animal figures in a lush fantastic background.
1) Silja Hong
This gorgeous set of images really did take my breath away.
6) Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski
Second frame of third page:
I could not understand what this was about at all. I could not follow the plot (if there was one) or get the characters sorted out in my head. You can get it here.
5) Monstress vol. 7: Devourer, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Second frame of Chapter Thirty-Eight (the third chapter in this volume):
Lots of people love this series, and I’m sorry, but I don’t; the art is gorgeous, but I have lost track of the plot by now, and I find the violence too squicky. You can get it here.
4) DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, and Zid
Second frame of third page:
This is quite nicely done, but lacks both the visual grandeur of the film and the narrative detail of the book (even though of course it has more narrative detail than the film, and more visual grandeur than the book). Dune already has twoHugos anyway. But you can get it here.
3) Once & Future Vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamara Bonvillain
Second frame of third chapter:
I had actually read this last year, because I have been enjoying this series so much: King Arthur comes back as an undead demon revenant, and our hero, his grandmother and his girlfriend are desperately mobilising a small group of allies across the real and unreal realms. Cracking humour, great characterisation; maybe a bit less tied into the underlying mythos than previous volumes, maybe that’s not a bad thing. You can get it here.
2) Saga, Vol 10, by Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan
Second frame of third part:
After the brutal end to volume 9, and the subsequent three-year pause in publication, I wondered how the authors would manage to pick it up. I need not have worried; time has passed for the main characters as well, and we see a lot of the story from the viewpoint of Hazel, the little girl whose parents have been at the centre of Saga up to now. Lots here about smuggling, blended families, evil galactic plots and so on. Ends yet again on a cliff-hanger. Not sure how this will appeal to those who have not read the previous nine volumes. (Six of which were Hugo finalists, the first winning in 2013.) You can get it here.
1) Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes
Second frame of third chapter:
I came to this without any expectations, and was thoroughly won over. I’m not especially familiar with the mythology of Superman, still less Supergirl, and in any case I suspect that this off-earth adventure of cosmic vengeance may not be a typical Supergirl story. But I thought it was brilliant: a super script and plot, gorgeous art making the most of the potential of the comics format, and a thoroughly satisfactory characterisation of Supergirl and her pal Ruth. I felt that Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is head and shoulders above the rest of the field. 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.
Two trips out of Belgium that month, one to London where I also took in the Science Museum’s (somewhat disappointing) exhibit about science fiction, and a spontaneous excursion to Amsterdam with F to meet up with my brother and his daughter just before Christmas. Meanwhile I got in the moo for the office Christmas party, which had a “jungle” theme:
I read 30 books that month.
December 2022 books
Non-fiction 5 (YTD 97) Warriors’ Gate, by Frank Collins Zink, by David Van Reybrouck The Romans, by Jacob Edwards The Ahtisaari Legacy, ed. Nina Suomalainen and Jyrki Karvinen What If? by Randall Munroe
Non-genre 3 (YTD 18) A Darker Shade, ed. John-Henri Holmberg A Ship is Dying, by Brian Callison On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe
SF 17 (YTD 122) The Spare Man, by Mary Robinette Kowal Titan Blue, by M.B. Fox Filter House, by Nisi Shawl The Splendid City, by Karen Heuler Looking Further Backward, by Arthur Dudley Vinton Ion Curtain, by Anya Ow Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, by Lawrence M. Schoen Bluebird, by Ciel Pierlot “Schrödinger’s Kitten”, by George Alec Effinger The Turing Option, by Harry Harrison with Marvin Minsky The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness “The Last of the Winnebagos”, by Connie Willis Shadows of Amber, by John Betancourt The Red Scholar’s Wake, by Aliette de Bodard Killing Time, by Caleb Carr The Free Lunch, by Spider Robinson Sewer, Gas and Electric, by Matt Ruff
Doctor Who 3 (YTD 34) Doctor Who: Origin Stories (ed. ?Dave Rudden?) Doctor Who and Warriors’ Gate, by John Lydecker Doctor Who: The Romans, by Donald Cotton
Comics 2 (YTD 20) Official Secrets, by Cavan Scott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson and Marco Lesko The Carnival of Immortals, by Enki Bilal
7,100 pages (YTD 66,500) 9/30 (YTD 109/298) by non-male writers (Suomalainen, Unigwe, Kowal, Shawl, Heuler, Ow, Pierlot, Willis, de Bodard, Melo) 4/30 (YTD 39/298) by a non-white writer (Unigwe, Shawl, Ow, de Bodard)
The best of these were the essay collection The Ahtisaari Legacy, which is out of print, and The Red Scholar’s Wake, which you can get here; the worst was Titan Blue, which you can get here.
2022 books roundup
I read 298 books in 2022, two more than in 2021, the fourth highest of the nineteen years that I have been keeping track, and the highest since 2011.
Page count for the year: 76,500, ninth highest of the nineteen years I have recorded, almost in the middle; there are some very short books in there.
Books by non-male writers in 2022: 109 (37%), second highest tally and fourth highest percentage of the years I have been counting.
Books by PoC in 2021: 39 (13%), second highest tally and third highest percentage since I started counting.
Most-read author: a tie between two previous winners, Terrance Dicks and Kieron Gillen, with five each. The Dicks novelisations were all re-reads.
1) Science Fiction and Fantasy (excluding Doctor Who)
When I first wrote up my books of the year I didn’t name any of the Clarke submissions. I will now say that the three I enjoyed most which I read in 2022 were:
95 books (32%) – highest ever number, third highest percentage. I think this has been driven upwards by the excellent Black Archive series of short books about Doctor Who stories, but that’s not the only factor.
Duran Duran: The First Four Years of the Fab Five, by Neil Gaiman, early stufffrom a writer who went on to much better things; out of print.
3) Doctor Who
Fiction other than comics: 39 books (13%), 10th highest total (dead in the middle) of the last nineteen years and highest since 2017, 13th highest percentage
Including non-fiction and comics: 72 (24%), 7th highest total and 6th highest percentage, both highest since 2013
Snotgirl Volume 1: Green Hair Don’t Care, by Bryan Lee O’Malley and Lesley Hung, an encouraging start to a new series; get it here
Once and Futurevol 3: The Parliament of Magpies and vol 4: Monarchies in the UK, by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain, continues to delightfully and brutally subvert Arthuriana; get them here and here
The 2022 winner of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize was, for the first time, a book of poetry, The Sun is Open, by QUB-based writer Gail McConnell. In fact the 119 pages of text are one long poem broken into chunks, playing with text and with font colour, processing the writer’s reaction to going through a box of her father’s things, long after he died in 1984 at 35, shot dead by the IRA while checking under his car for bombs, in front of his wife and his then three-year-old daughter.
Gail McConnell barely remembers her father and has no memory of that awful day, but of course it has affected her whole life, and the poetry captures that disruption and the effect of engaging with her father through a box of personal souvenirs, most notably a diary and a Students Union handbook from his own time at QUB. There is some imaginative playing with structure – quotations from the box are in grey text, documents are quoted in fragments to let us fill in the blanks, at one point the page fills with vertical bars to symbolise the prison where her father worked. It’s provocative and unsettling, and meant to be.
I thought it was incredible and it’s my book of the year for 2022. You can get it here.
Previous Books of the Year:
2003 (2 months): The Separation, by Christopher Priest (review; get it here) 2004: (reread) The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien (review; get it here) – Best new read: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here) 2005: The Island at the Centre of the World, by Russell Shorto (review; get it here) 2006: Lost Lives: The stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles, by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea (review; get it here) 2007: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel (review; get it here) 2008: (reread) The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, by Anne Frank (review; get it here) – Best new read: Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, by William Makepeace Thackeray (review; get it here) 2009: (had seen it on stage previously) Hamlet, by William Shakespeare (review; get it here) – Best new read: Persepolis 2: the Story of a Return, by Marjane Satrapi (first volume just pipped by Samuel Pepys in 2004) (review; get it here) 2010: The Bloody Sunday Report, by Lord Savile et al. (review of vol I; get it here) 2011: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (started in 2009!) (review; get it here) 2012: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Brontë (review; get it here) 2013: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf (review; get it here) 2014: Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell (review; get it here) 2015: collectively, the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist, in particular the winner, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel (get it here). However I did not actually blog about these, being one of the judges at the time. – Best book I actually blogged about: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Claire Tomalin (review; get it here) 2016: Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot (review; get it here) 2017: Common People: The History of an English Family, by Alison Light (review; get it here) 2018: Factfulness, by Hans Rosling (review; get it here) 2019: Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (review; get it here) 2020: From A Clear Blue Sky: Surviving the Mountbatten Bomb, by Timothy Knatchbull (review; get it here) 2021: Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins (review; get it here)
Second paragraph of third chapter (first part; you don’t need it all):
I turned to the chapter on Strathspey flies where I kept my research list. Jumping off points for my nightly dives generally fell under one of the following topics, and quickly devolved from there.
Really awful. Not as funny as he thinks it is, by a long way. You can get it here.
Non-fiction 10 (YTD 58) Representatives of the People?: Parliamentarians and Constituents in Modern Democracies, ed. Vernon Bogdanor Falling to Earth, by Al Worden Gifted Amateurs and Other Essays, by David Bratman Autism Spectrum Disorders Through the Lifespan, by Digby Tantam The Stones of Blood, by Katrin Thier Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan (did not finish) Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?, ed. Mick O’Hare Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir, by Wil Wheaton The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul
Non-genre 4 (YTD 18) Love and Mr Lewisham, by H.G. Wells The Man Who Died Twice, by Richard Osman The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver
SF 17 (YTD 139) A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L’Engle Akata Woman, by Nnedi Okorafor The Outcast, by Louise Cooper Bloodmarked, by Tracy Deonn (did not finish) Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, by Charlie Jane Anders Collision Course, by Robert Silverberg / Nemesis from Terra, by Leigh Brackett Nettle and Bone, by “T. Kingfisher” Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods, by Catherynne M. Valente What Moves the Dead, by “T. Kingfisher” A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow A Rumor of Angels, by Dale Bailey Into the Riverlands, by Nghi Vo Even Though I Knew the End, by C.L. Polk Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire “Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
Doctor Who 4 (YTD 25) The Shadow Man, by Sharon Bidwell Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion, by Peter Harness Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, by Terrance Dicks Doctor Who – The Stones of Blood, by David Fisher
Comics 7 (YTD 21) Sins of the Father, by Nick Abadzis et al Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, by Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, by Bartosz Sztybor, Filipe Andrade, Alessio Fioriniello, Roman Titov, and Krzysztof Ostrowski Monstress vol. 7: Devourer, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission, by George S. Elrick DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, and Zid Daleks, ed. Marcus Hearn
10,000 pages (YTD 64,900) 21/42 (YTD 115/267) by non-male writers (Thier, Kingsolver, L’Engle, Okorafor, Deonn, Anders, Brackett, 2x “Kingfisher”, Valente, Harrow, Vo, Polk, McGuire, Kress, Muir, Tidwell, illustrators of Sins of the Father, Evely, Liu/Takeda, Sturges) 6/42 (YTD 36/267) by a non-white writer (Naipaul, Okorafor, Deonn, Vo, Polk, Liu/Takeda) 6 rereads (The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman, A Wind in the Door, Nemesis from Terra, “Beggars in Spain”, Doctor Who and the Stones of Blood, Doctor Who – The Stones of Blood)
359 books currently tagged unread – down 1 from last month, with purchases and other acquisitions balancing books cleared off the piles.
Reading now Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
Coming soon (perhaps) War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara, by David Fisher The Night of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat The Day of the Doctor, by Alasdair Stuart A Life of My Own, by Claire Tomalin Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson A Brief History of the Hobbit, by John D. Rateliff Nine Black Doves – Volume 5: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd Rupetta, by N.A. Sulway Living with the Gods, by Neil MacGregor What Not: A Prophetic Comedy, by Rose Macaulay 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 Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort 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
The first thing Tanta does when she gets outside is check on the rest of her unit. They’re still shaken by Porter’s death, but they’ve recovered well from their initial panic. Wright has assumed command of the team and is doing a decent job of keeping up morale; he has established a security perimeter around the building and has the rest of the guardians super-vising the cleaning crews who have arrived to sweep up the debris.The guardians are also holding back an increasingly vocal throng of onlookers.The crowd is fractious, shouting questions at Wright and the team and trying to push past the perimeter they’ve created. Not an ideal situation, but at least it gives her harried colleagues something to focus on besides the explosion. Once she’s sure that Wright has everything under control, Tanta takes herself across the road from the Needle and waits.
This was an Ace Double from 1961, combining a Robert Silverberg novel (expanded from an earlier version published in 1959) with the Leigh Brackett novel that won the 1945 Retro Hugo. Of the latter, I wrote at the time:
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Mayo McCall watched the men running back and forth below. Quite calmly she reached out and closed the switch that controlled her testing beam — the ray that spanned the head of the drift and checked every carload of dull red rock for Fallonite content, the chemically amorphous substance that was already beginning to revolutionize the Terran plastic industry.
Fairly standard but well executed pulp planetary romance / space opera, with desert Mars, swampy Venus and our hero overcoming evil Earth industrialists and perhaps a bit of commentary on colonialism as well. Brackett is one of two women in this category, and the only one to get a solo listing. You can get the original pulp version here and buy a later book version here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Collision Course is:
Bernard lay sprawled in his vibrochair, cradling a volume of Yeats on his lap while the shoulder-lamp wriggled unhappily in its attempt to keep the beam focussed on the page no matter how Bernard might alter his position. A flask of rare brandy, twenty years old, imported from one of the Procyon worlds, was within easy reach. Bernard had his drink, his music, his poetry, his warmth. What better way, he asked himself, to relax after spending two hours trying to pound the essentials of sociometrics into the heads of an obtuse clump of sophomores?
It’s early but very competent Silverberg, a new wrinkle on the Cosmic Duel theme where humanity and one group of aliens are competing for control of our galaxy and a godlike force intervenes to force a settlement. Particularly entertaining in that the humans in Team Earth don’t get on with each other at all. Needless to say, no women characters appear except in flashbacks.
This was the SF book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission by George S. Elrick (if I can find it).
Surprise stopped Anne midway across the living room. Granted the room wasn’t huge, but a pair of two-seater sofas, separate miss-matched chairs, a coffee table, sideboard and bookcase, left plenty of room to walk between the furniture. A sense of Madeleine’s apology extending far beyond the limits of her home unsettled Anne, though she struggled to understand why. Before she could enquire, Madeleine pushed them into a whirlwind tour, cutting their greeting short.
Second in the Bloodlines sub-series of Lethbridge-Stewart books, in which Anne Travers and her husband Bill visit France to investigate sinister gangs-on and body-horror in a laboratory. The story is decently enough told, but the connection with Doctor Who so weak that I think I may clear this sequence from my reading list in future. You can get it here.
We race to the inner fort, Devadarshan and I. We seem safer here from missiles; yet the people are more tense and fearful. Perhaps it is because they are not sepoys, but women, children and old folk. They have not the release of action; they can only wait for their fate to be made known to them.
Pam and I had married so that we could be together during my training. We had already decided to spend our lives together, and we didn’t want that commitment interrupted. Why wait, we reasoned? We’d been dating long enough that marriage seemed like a natural step.
Another of the astronaut autobiographies which I saw recommended in this blog post in 2020 (via File 770). I enjoyed Michael Collins’ Carrying the Fire so much that I made it my book of 2021. Like Collins, Worden got to circle the Moon while his colleagues went and landed on it; unlike Collins, his career had a hard crash immediately afterwards, as a result of a scandal involving the sale for profit of commemorative stamps that the astronauts had brought to the lunar surface and back. Worden stayed loyal to his commander, David Scott, when the whole story broke, but nearing the end of his life clearly felt that he needed to tell his side and clarify Scott’s overall responsibility. (He died at 88 in March 2020; Scott, now 91, is the last remaining Apollo commander.)
On the technological side, Worden’s account tallies with Collins, though it’s less funny; it’s rather delightful though to read of him developing a passion for lunar geology, and manically photographing every possible inch of the moon’s surface while in orbit. Worden’s personal life was more complex, as he and his first wife divorced while he was undergoing his astronaut training, and one also senses that he was politically less astute than Collins – he notes of a dinner that the Apollo 15 team had with President Nixon and Vice-President Agnew that all five of them underwent public disgrace soon afterwards, but there is not much introspection as to how this happened.
The part of the story I found most shocking in fact was the serious health issue endured by the third man on the mission, James Irwin, whose heart underwent serious stress in the final stages of the lunar excursion. Irwin had a heart attack less than two years after their mission, aged only 43, and was the first of the twelve who walked on the moon to die, aged 61 in 1991. NASA failed to communicate Irwin’s health situation clearly to the three astronauts, and Scott, decided that they should keep working, an error as it turned out, but based on incomplete information. Both the stamps scandal and Irwin’s overwork were mistaken decisions made by Scott, but in a framework established by NASA that made these mistakes very easy to make.
(Irwin became an evangelical Christian after he returned from the moon and went on expeditions to find Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat, asserting that the Book of Genesis was literally true. His grandparents were from Pomeroy, Co Tyrone, and he described himself as the first Irishman on the Moon.)
Space is exciting stuff and although I think Michael Collins’s book is superior, this is still an entertaining read. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next is A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell.
I wake to the familiar sound of the key, turning gently in the lock, a three-phase sound, scrape-scrape-click. It is a brass key tied with a pink silk tassel, carried by a member of our domestic staff. She knocks discreetly at my door and says, ‘Good morning, Arthur,’ without any emotion. She doesn’t enter the room. I know what the key looks like because she wears it at all times on her belt. It hangs there sweetly, next to her electroshock gun.
Very crude feminist satire (or something). Didn’t like it much. You can get it here.
Current Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver Nona the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir Dawn of the New Everything: A Journey Through Virtual Reality, by Jaron Lanier
Last books finished Even Though I Knew the End, by C.L. Polk Arachnids in the UK, by Sam Maleski Where the Drowned Girls Go, by Seanan McGuire The Various Lives of Keats and Chapman: Including the Brother, by Flann O’Brien Monstress vol. 7: Devourer, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan (did not finish) “Beggars in Spain”, by Nancy Kress Will We Ever Speak Dolphin?, ed. Mick O’Hare Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir, by Wil Wheaton Major Matt Mason: Moon Mission, by George S. Elrick The Return of Eva Perón with the Killings in Trinidad, by V. S. Naipaul DUNE: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, by Lilah Sturges, Drew Johnson, and Zid
Next books War of the Gods, by Nick Abadzis et al Keats and Chapman Wryed Again, by Steven A. Jent The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd
This is one of my favourite categories for the Hugos, and this year I think there is a clear winner.
6) Buffalito World Outreach Project, by Lawrence M. Schoen
Second paragraph of third chapter (the Bengali translation):
প্রবেশ ফটকে লেখা ছিল,
The marquee out front read
“বিস্ময়কর কনরয়, মহান সম্মোহনগুরু”
THE AMAZING CONROY, MASTER HYPNOTIST
লোকদের নজর কাড়ার এক সংকোচহীন এবং আতিরক্তপ্রচেষ্টা। সেটি অবশ্য কাজেও দিয়েছিল। আমার শো’য়ের দর্শক যেদিন তুলনামূলক অল্প হতো, সেদিনও পর্যাপ্ত সংখ্যাক লোক হতো, আর দর্শক বেশি হলে তো রা জায়গা ভরে যেত। জিব্রান্ত্রর মতো ভেনুগুলোতে যেকোনো ধরণের চাহিদা নিরন্তর, আর সেখানে একজন মঞ্চ সম্মোহকারী ভালো উপার্জন করতে পারে।
and cycled through a googol of colorful hues in a blatant attempt to remain eye-catching. It worked. My smallest audiences were decent, and the large ones packed the place. Venues like Gibrahl are always hungry for any kind of entertainment, and a stage hypnotist can make a good buck.
A single short story translated into into thirty languages, including “Croation” [sic] and two varieties of Spanish. I absolutely support its eligibility for the category – to be eligible, a nominee “if fictional, is noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and … is not eligible in any other category.” The story “Buffalo Dogs” itself was first published in 2001, so it is not eligible for this year’s Best Short Story or Best Novelette categories (at 7800 words it’s on the cusp between them). And the whole point of Buffalito World Outreach Project is that it’s noteworthy not for the primary text but because of the translations. You can get it here.
However, to adapt Dr Johnson, this is a case of being impressed that the thing has been done at all, rather than wondering if it has been done well. I am glad that this has been done, but the other five finalists are more worthy winners.
(Also, although Lawrence M. Schoen is the finalist, what about the thirty or so people who did the translating?)
5) Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, by Kyle Buchanan
Second paragraph of third chapter:
So, would Mad Max work just as well if it were a TV show?
A detailed account of the making of Mad Max: Fury Road, featuring interviews with many many people from the cast and crew. It’s the unabashed writing of a super-fan (and top NYT reporter), who holds both the film and the director/producer George Miller in the highest regard. I was not so blown away by the film myself, and I confess I lasted only fifty pages into an intense book about a subject which doesn’t interest me all that much. You can get it here.
4) Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir, by Wil Wheaton
Second paragraph of third chapter, with footnote:
In addition to the things we Star Trek people usually do at conventions (signing autographs, posing for pictures, answering questions, and saying “Engage!”), I took a group of people from the ACME Comedy Theatre with me to perform a sketch comedy show. The entire convention experience is chronicled in “The Saga of SpongeBob Vega$Pants,” which is the centerpiece of my first collection of essays, Dancing Barefoot.*
* I’m so proud of this little book. I often look back at my early writing and cringe (you’ve probably cringed with me a few times just in this text) but Barefoot is nothing but joyful memories and the very best I could do at the time. I don’t encounter copies of it very often (its entire run was less than five thousand), but it is where I started, and it will always have a very special place in my heart.
Again, a book on a subject that I am not all that invested in (Wil Wheaton), written by an author who is deeply and passionately committed to that subject (Wil Wheaton). In fact this is an update of an autobiographical book first published in 2004, with explanatory footnotes telling us how his life and attitudes changed between then and 2021, with Star Trek: The Next Generation probably the single topic with most coverage but plenty else as well (for instance, there’s a gruelling account of a family medical emergency).
I found the result is a bit unsatisfactory; the structure is choppy, as most of the content is recycled from Wheaton’s blog, and some of the content is repeated, usually more than once, especially the question of how lousy his parents were. And there is a running joke, which gets old rather fast, about how much he hates his editor for the crime of, er, editing. But I give a couple of plus points for actually having the footnotes at the bottom of each page rather than the end of the book. You can get it here.
3) Ghost of Workshops Past: How Communism, Conservatism, and the Cold War Still Mold Our Paths Into SFF Writing, by S.L. Huang
Second to fourth paragraphs of third section:
Milford, I was told. Milford. And again Milford
I generally prefer my Best Related Work nominees and finalists to be books, but I am still rating this blog post ahead of two serious non-fiction monographs. It’s a straightforward analysis of how the standard model of writer training workshops among the sf community emerged from the Cold War, and how it doesn’t really work all that well for non-white aspiring writers. This is an important topic, but not a huge one, and the blog post deals with it efficiently and succinctly. You can read it here.
2) Chinese Science Fiction: An Oral History, Vol 1, ed. Yang Feng
Second paragraph of English introduction to third chapter (an interview with Liu Shahe [1932-2019], who is much better known as a poet and calligrapher than an sf fan):
Liu Shahe was not trained in the humanities; he studied agriculture at Sichuan University. Amongst the older generation of Sichuanese writers, he was one of the rare people with a profound interest in natural science. He was also curious about the unknown. When Shi Bo, the editor-in-chief of The Journal of UFO Research visited him in Chengdu, he had an entire speech about dozens of examples of humans encountering UFOs, convinced that extraterrestrial civilizations existed.
English-speakers have been given enough information through the Hugo packet to make it clear that this is a major and important compendium of interviews with seven crucial people in the history of the development of science fiction in China. Unfortunately only one is a woman (Yang Xiao), but this is clearly a work in progress. Not easily available outside China, other than through the Hugo packet.
1) Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, by Rob Wilkins
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Granny Pratchett, Terry’s paternal grandmother, rolled her own cigarettes. Then, having smoked them, she would take the butts from the ashtray, pick the paper apart and return any strands of unburnt tobacco to the tin where she kept her supply. Waste not, want not. As Terry wrote in a short essay about her in 2004, ‘As a child this fascinated me, because you didn’t need to be a mathematician to see that this meant there must have been some shreds of tobacco she’d been smoking for decades, if not longer.’
As I wrote when this was up for the BSFA Award (which it won), this is a very good book about a very important subject. A lot of us know parts of the Terry Pratchett story – I first heard him speak in public in Cambridge in, I think, 1987, and last saw him at the 2010 Discworld Convention, and spoke to him a couple of times in between. It’s lovely to have it all between two covers, with the laughs and the tears, and with Rob also explaining the complicated nature of his relationship with Terry over the years, beginning as amanuensis and ending as nurse. I am voting for it and I expect that others will do so as well. You can get it here.
Here is a nice photo that I took of Rob Wilkins with Aliette de Bodard, the evening that they both won BSFA Awards in April. (The two winners who I myself voted for.)
I griped previously about the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category having too many finalists where you needed to know the rest of the series to really understand them, and the same goes for the Lodestar Award; two of the six are sequels, two more are threequels, as it were, and one is the fourth in a sequence. It is great that people enjoy these series so much, and that’s why we have the Best Series category (which has only one overlap here). But it makes it more difficult for voters who may not have read previous instalments to assess the success of the latest volume. I don’t think it is worthwhile to tweak the rules in any way on this, I’m just saying that I wish voters would nominate books that stand better on their own. Having said that, some of these stand better on their own than others.
6) Bloodmarked, by Tracy Deonn
Second paragraph of third chapter:
To my left, William glances at the kneeling sorcerers, then back to me. Right. Now is the time to use the protocol I’ve studied. I clear my throat. “Rise, Mage Seneschal Varelian of the High Council and noble members of the Round Table Mageguard.”
I thought that the notion of the Round Table turning up in Chapel Hill as a phenomenon among university students was a load of rubbish when I read the first volume in 2021, and I think so still. I gave this 50 pages before tossing it aside.
5) The Golden Enclaves, by Naomi Novik
Second paragraph of third chapter:
I expect ordinarily it was a grand, dramatic space. Therewas a tiled mosaic floor beneath our feet, and statues liningup alongside a pool running the length of the room with afountain at one end and a skylight overhead. There shouldhave been an illusion of sky up there, made more believableby looking at it in the rippling water, but instead it was onlythe blank empty void, and the pool was still and pitch-dark,with nothing to reflect. The fountain spout was still letting afew drops fall occasionally like a leaking faucet, every unpredictabledrop too-loudand echoing. This had to be the oldestpart of the enclave, the one that had been built when Londonitself was just lurching its way towards becoming a city, andit was clearly meant to make you think of the glory that wasRome. Instead it felt like Pompeii just before the flames, a thinblanket of ash already laid down and more coming.
I was colossally disappointed with this, the third in the Scholomance series (which is also up in Best Series). I had put the first volume top of my ballot in 2021, and the second volume second last year. But I felt it would have been better left as a two-parter. Our heroine traipses around the world, through different magical enclaves which are completely indistinguishable whether in Portugal or China, and engages in a quest to rescue the man she loves while also dealing with other emotional entanglements. Compared with the previous two books, I felt it completely lost focus.
4) Akata Woman, by Nnedi Okorafor
Second paragraph of third chapter:
“Please, please, please,” Sunny had said last week to her frowning parents. They knew about her and Orlu, but that didn’t mean they were open to it. “It’s just dinner. Nowhere else.”
I am sorry to keep sounding grumpy. But this was a case where I had quite enjoyed the second book, when I read it way back in 2018, having missed the first; and this seemed to me a rather unspectacular magical training school story, if set in a slightly different culture.
3) Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, by Charlie Jane Anders
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Her barge descends past a dozen towers, blaring with candy-colored lights. Holographic gameplay swirls around the rooftops and cartoon icons run around under a skyline dominated by the crimson curlicues of the nearby Royal Space Academy. Even with Rachael’s Joiner set to “maximum introvert” mode, the shouts of a half-million players and spectators still ring out, and she can smell the fried Scanthian parsnips and bottles of snah-snah juice that everybody uses to fuel marathon gaming sessions.
Getting less grumpy now, as this sequel seemed to me independently enjoyable even if you haven’t read (or can’t remember) last year’s Victories Greater than Death. Six teens turn out to be vital to the future of humanity, and must confront various potentially fatal challenges for high stakes while dealing with the usual agonies of relationships and (interestingly) creativity.
1) Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods, by Catherynne M. Valente
Second paragraph of third chapter:
Even at an hour before midnight in Littlebridge, even with shadows as thick as coat sleeves hanging all round. You could still see the red leaves fluttering on the trees. And the red glass in the fancy windows and the red sheen on the moon reflected in the deep black water. The riverbanks ran over with red leaves, red rose hips, red zinnias, red squashes growing wild for anyone to take.
Fantasy of a boy called to save his people with a bunch of unlikely allies, which charmed me with Valente’s approach to integrating folklore with her own narrative, with vivid descriptions of people and places, and also just by not being a sequel. Gets my vote this year.
In general I have felt that the Lodestar Award has delivered more quality to the ballot, and on a good year the finalists en bloc are competitive with the Best Novel Hugo. I did not feel that this was an especially good year.
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.
This is the twelfth last of these posts; the last will be the October 2023 update.
My only trip outside Belgium in November 2022 was a work outing to London, which I have not otherwise recorded, but I had two interesting day trips; one with F to the sculptures at Borgloon:
And one with U to the Picasso exhibition in Brussels.
At work, I was honoured to greet a courageous woman:
7,400 pages (YTD 69,400) 9/32 (YTD 100/268) by non-male writers (Çerkez, Alderman, North, Scarborough, Newman, Jemisin, White, Hansen, McKeand) 2/32 (YTD 35/268) by a non-white writer (Jemisin, Hansen)
Four books that I really enjoyed this month:
Death of a Naturalist, the classic poetry collection by Seamus Heaney; you can get it here.
The Caucasus: An Introduction, by Tom de Waal, unfortunately out of date since the recent war but fantastic to understand the region; you can get it here.
Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman, a gripping study of an isolated culture in London. You can get it here.
The Flight of the Aphrodite, a hard sf Clarke submission that really grabbed me; you can get it here.
Several of the other Clarke submissions this month were frankly unreadable; specifically Momenticon, Azura Ghost and Prophets of the Red Night. You can get them here, here and here.
The shock had caught him off guard, but now he was rallying his composure – although it took considerable effort in the face of what had happened. No human being should be capable of breaking through the barrier which held this Castle frozen in a Timeless limbo. His own power, great as it was, couldn’t penetrate the formless, dimensionless yet appallingly real warp of time and space that had trapped him here in his last, desperate attempt to save his life and his soul; and whatever he psychic talents, Cyllan was no true sorceress. Yet she was here, as real as he was…
Second in Cooper’s Time Master trilogy, almost entirely set in and around the castle where her protagonist is being held captive and from which he is trying to escape. The really subversive bit is that the protagonist is very clearly the Bad Guy, and his freedom could lead to disaster for the rest of the fantasy world; Cooper shows this pretty clearly, but also engages our sympathy very successfully on behalf of the villain. A very strong story. You can get it here.
This was my top unread sf book. Next on that pile is The Cartographers, by Peng Shepherd.
