This train is running 40 minutes late.

Just as well I had allowed an hour’s turnaround in Munich; but I think I’ll be getting a taxi to the airport rather than the local train.

Ian is sceptical about the prospects that people might choose to have a vegetarian meal once a week for the sake of fighting global warming. I am not so sure. I first heard this idea a few months ago from the former Dutch liberal party leader Lousewies van der Laan, who is now a UN consultant on environmental issues. Then last weekend in Bled I was slightly stunned to hear it recommended emphatically by Wolfgang Schüssel, the former Chancellor of Austria. I basically agree with Ian that few people will change their lifestyles on the say-so of a UN official. But when political leaders (especially senior conservative politicians in countries famous for their meat dishes) start saying so too, then I reckon it may catch on.

Language Log takes a letter from a parent worried about the way their child talks and ends up discussing the origins of the Belfast accent.

7) The Infinity Doctors, by Lance Parkin

This wasn’t quite the book I expected. (I thought I had read somewhere that this was the one where various different versions of canonicity collide; obviously not.) This is an alternate timeline where the Doctor never left Gallifrey, and neither did the Master (here renamed the Magistrate); both ascended to high office among the Time Lords. The Doctor is brokering a peace deal between the Sontarans and the Rutans, but meanwhile Omega is trying to break out of his anti-matter universe using the Doctor’s body; so it’s a combination and re-orientation of The Three Doctors, The Invasion of Time and Arc of Infinity (Hedin is the only other TV canon character in the story) with some very small bits of The Deadly Assassin and The Five Doctors. There are also a number of nods to Stephen Baxter, which is mildly amusing.

While I liked the overall idea, and numerous details of the scenery, I wasn’t so sure about some of the plot. I felt that the Gallifrey audios managed to balance the idea of competing factions in Gallifrey, powerful external forces and rogue Time Lords rather better, and without having to invent a whole new continuity. One crucial point is that the Gallifreyan security system really is unrealistically poor, even for the sclerotic Time Lord society: there is little sense of urgency from the President and High Council as the body count rises in the corridors of the citadel, or when important visitors start going astray, and the Watch’s investigations are astonishingly incompetent.

However, the interactions between Time Lords and the rest of Gallifreyan society are well done, and so is the depiction of Omega’s universe and its limitations. There are also some intriguing hints about the Doctor’s own lost past, and his capacity for loving women of his own race. (And of course it’s impossible to know which Doctor we are dealing with here – Paul McGann without the wig, perhaps?)

Fails the Bechdel test, I’m afraid. There are few women characters – Omega’s unnamed wife, Larna who is the Doctor’s quasi-companion, and Larna’s maidservant; the first of these never meets the other two, and the only direct speech interchange between Larna and her maid is about a male visitor.

Otherwise, not bad, but not a classic either.

Just reflecting back on my recent travels: on Monday evening last week, I was in Slovenia, and went out for dinner with a journalist friend. We ordered the meal in a mixture of pointing to the Slovenian menu and my tourist-level Serbo-Croat – which is similar to Slovenian, but sufficiently distinct in various ways to easily qualify as a separate language. I skipped breakfast on Tuesday as I was coming back to Brussels, but met a couple of people for lunch at one of the cafes near my office. As is standard in that part of town, we ordered in French but there was a strong undercurrent of Italian to the conversation, especially when difficulties arose. Then in the evening, finally at home, I took Anne out for dinner to one of the local places. Since we live in Flanders, we ordered in Dutch. It became clear that the staff also spoke English, but by that point I had almost forgotten how to do that in a restaurant.

And it’s German for the next two days.

Up early to go to Salzburg (flying to Munich, then taking the train). On Tuesday I will get up early to come back, and on Wednesday I have a breakfast meeting in Brussels which will make the third early morning in four days. I know some of you are natural larks, or have small and active children, but I am an old owl of 41 and it goes against the grain!

Since I’ve been travelling both last Sunday and today, I am going to take next Friday off to watch my (American) assistant getting married in Antwerp. While she has been doing wedding preparations, I have had a temporary replacement in the office; she is from Montenegro, which explains the strange accent of the person answering the phone in the unlikely event that you call me at work.

I hope they do something resembling breakfast on this flight.

6) How Proust Can Change Your Life, by Alain de Botton

I’m tremendously grateful to for recommending this to me. De Botton does a brilliant job of juxtaposing Proust’s many oddities as a person (there is a truly hilarious account of his one disastrous meeting with James Joyce) with the achievement of his writing. In particular, he points out, the point of Proust’s work is not so much to bring us into the imagined world of Combray, Balbec and Paris, but to equip us readers to experience our own world, our relationships, our reading, all the more vividly. The chapters have titles like “How to Be a Good Friend”, “How to Be Happy in Love” and “How to Suffer Successfully”, all with evidence from In Search of Lost Time backed up with stories from Proust’s own life of how he did (or quite often did not) live up to these ideas himself. Excellent stuff, and actually a great book for people who have not yet read Proust but might be thinking about doing so.

From time to time I get random queries about one or other aspect of my website; I’m going to start posting a few of them here, suitably anonymised.

Hello. While going through the estate of my grandfather in New England, I’ve come across a copy of “In Starry Realms” which is signed inside by the author “[E A], August ’96, from R.S. Ball Jr.” [E A] is my great grandmother. I wondered if there would be any interest in this book, perhaps among fans, from the academic personnel at Cambridge or elsewhere, or in the realm of book collectors in general. I thought I’d write and ask your opinion.

My reply:

R.S. Ball jr will certainly be Robert Steele Ball, born 1869, the son of the astronomer (they are buried in the same grave), who was a successful engineer in his own right, and studied for a while in Boston which might explain his acquaintance with your great-grandmother. It’s a nice touch to have his signature in the book, and it may add a dollar or two to the sale value, but to be honest I expect a dealer will be much more interested in its overall condition. It’s not a particularly rare book, first published in 1892 so a copy bought in 1896 is unlikely to be a first edition.

5) The Stone Rose, by Jacqueline Rayner

This is the most owned Doctor Who book on LibraryThing, for some reason; I guess it was the first Tenth Doctor book to come out. Team Tardis (Doctor and Rose, with Mickey and Jackie visible too) find a statue of Rose dating from Roman times in the British Museum. Solving the mystery takes a certain amount of timewarping, mostly during the reign of Hadrian, and dealing with an advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. The characterisation of Ten is nice enough, though not yet developed to the heights of Tennant’s recent performance. The plot was a bit handwavey and the writing a bit flat. (I found the same problem with Rayner’s introductory Six/Evelyn audio, The Marian ConspiracyDoctor Who and the Pirates is a different matter.) My classically-inclined Whovian friends will need to get this to complete the set of The Romans/The Fires of Pompeii etc, but others can probably give it a miss. Passes the Bechdel test though with Rose and a girl from the future sorting things out in the Doctor’s absence.

4) The Ill-Made Mute, by Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Got this ages back (possibly as long ago as 2002) after it appeared on a couple of “best of the year” lists. I found it somewhat tough going. It is a fantasy novel about a disfigured, voiceless youth who endures a prolonged quest adventure in the course of achieving full adulthood. The adventures are decently enough recounted, and take us through a succession of traditional fantasy locales each of which has its own local twist – the castle, the ship, the treasure cave, the city, the enchanted forest; and the world is subject to peculiar “unstorms”, disturbances in the local reality. I wasn’t so engaged or convinced by the human geography of the world, and if anything a bit annoyed by Dart-Thornton saving the info-dumping to the middle of the book, while at the start there are lots of characters telling long and somewhat tedious stories to each other without really advancing the plot. I struggled through to the end but won’t bother tracking down the others in the series. Passes the Bechdel test with a section where two female characters are kidnapped and locked up together.

Is Lembit Öpik actually going to stand in the Lib Dem presidential election? Ros Scott’s campaign site went live earlier this week; but there’s no mention of Lembit’s candidacy on the Montgomery Lib Dems site (perhaps that’s not allowed); nor, rather more surprisingly, on what appears to be his “official” site at ePolitix. (Indeed, the latter spells his surname “�pik” and appears not to have been updated for some time – the latest engagement marked in Lembit’s diary is for Saturday 12 June, which last fell in 2004.) The http://www.lembit4president.co.uk/ site is completely blank. Like anyone who reads the papers I know Lembit has not had an easy time in his personal life over the last few months; it would not astonish me if he decided that he didn’t need the hassle of the internal party election at this stage.

(Edited to add – I see James Graham asking the same question.)

3) Uit het Verleden van de Gemeente Oud-Heverlee, by Erik Martens

I picked this up at the town hall when doing the next phase of our citizenship process. Our commune was created in the local government reform of 1977, by a merger of five village councils (Oud-Heverlee itself, St-Joris-Weert to the south, Vaalbeek to the east and Blanden and Haasrode further east), and this 1981 book, commissioned by the mayor (who is still in office here, three decades later), is obviously intended to generate some historical credibility for the new administrative entity.

I was interested to read of the original settlement of the area by Germanic-speaking tribesmen penetrating the forests from the north after the fall of the Roman empire. We are jammed right up against the taalgrens/frontière linguistique here, and this read to me as a suspiciously convenient proof that the Flemish are of different racial origin from the Walloons. By Martens’ own account, there are remains from the Roman period in the commune, mainly to do with early industry (iron-smelting and charcoal-burning); are we meant to think that their descendants just fled south to speak proto-French when the barbarians came? I expect that the truth, if we could ever find it, would be much more complicated. Throughout the book I was struck that Martens uses sources from the commune itself, and from neighbouring Flemish towns, but much less so from our Walloon neighbours to the south.

Anyway, I’m willing to give the Franks credit for settling the villages per se in the 5th or 6th century. Our own village, Oud-Heverlee, is not actually any older than Heverlee (now a suburb of Leuven to the north); the “Oud” is reckoned to be a corruption of “Hout” meaning “wood”. Certainly it lay deeper in the forest. Interesting that Christianity arrived only a century or so after the Frankish settlers, my occasional cracks about ancient rituals notwithstanding. Our local church dates from the eleventh century, and is therefore three times older than the oldest building in my native city, Belfast.

By various means four of the five villages became part of the estates of the Dukes of Arenberg during the middle ages (Vaalbeek, which is geographically in the middle, was an ecclesiastical possession). The book has various documents to illustrate this – I was struck by how similar 14th-century Dutch is to today’s language, certainly compared with the difference between Chaucer and us. The noted anatomist Andreas Vesalius came from the de Wesele family which owned the local castle (though he himself didn’t inherit as his father was illegitimate).

But the general story of the more recent centuries is one of terrible conflicts and partial recovery. The 1480s and 1740s seem to have been the worst, as the villages were devastated by other people’s wars, though the 1570s and 1690s were bad too. I understood why Belgium was called the “cockpit of Europe”, and why any Belgian with an understanding of history is vehemently in favour of European integration.

The revolution against the Arenbergs in these parts was motivated partly by wild boar. The Dukes kept the forest well stocked with them, but of course they much preferred to root around in the farms and gardens of the villagers (and there were a lot more of them by now; the human population of the area almost doubled in the decades after the end of the French occupation in 1749). The villagers appealed to Emperor Joseph II, who found in their favour and ordered that all boar should either be killed or kept in enclosed spaces. When the revolution finally came, the only recorded military engagement of the local revolutionary militia here is the brave slaughter of the duke’s remaining boar, which were shut up in a disused convent.

The book ends, rather disappointingly, in around 1800. I wonder why? Is it because after that date, it becomes too difficult to disentangle our local affairs from those of Leuven? Or are there skeletons in the closet from the last two centuries which the mayor and the author deemed better left to rest? Perhaps I shall find out some day.

Actually the most interesting bit of psephological anorakery about this year’s election so far is Crooked Timber’s piece on the time zone biases of the candidates. The only Democratic candidate for either President or Vice-President who was living outside the Central or Eastern time zones (or at least the territory which now forms them) when nominated was Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon (who???), and he doesn’t really count. Meanwhile the Republicans have had a more westerly candidate on the ticket two times out of three (and this year of course that goes for both of them).

It’s probably not that significant, of course. But NB that while the Republicans won nine of the fourteen elections where they had a Western candidate, they won only one of the six where neither of their candidates was a Westerner (1988; losses in 1936, 1944, 1976, 1992 and 1996).

The Sarah Palin nomination looks to me like a stroke of genius. She actually looks like a normal person; I can’t remember the last candidate for either President or Vice-President who did. (Possibly Jimmy Carter.) There is a romantic streak in all of us that would like to see the outsider defeat the establishment, in any country, and the spirit of Jackson’s victory in 1828 (and to a much lesser extent Harrison’s in 1840) lives on. McCain sees himself in that mould, but has had difficulty conveying that message – candidates of the incumbent party will always find it particularly difficult to look like a new broom (the only example I can think of off-hand is Sarkozy in France last year, and look how quickly that went wrong). Palin however is clearly an outsider, a competent speaker, and as I said looks like a normal person. Whether or not Americans are really prepared to vote for someone who doesn’t look like a politician remains to be seen.

The response from the Left is helping, if anything. Yes, she is inexperienced, but the Republicans obviously realised that that wasn’t working as a charge against Obama, and decided to roll with it; and Obama’s supporters now cannot really use Palin’s inexperience against her without inviting the obvious counterattack – so what if Palin has only run a very small town and a very small state; that is still more than Obama has ever run (or, for that matter, McCain).

The news about her daughter is also a complete winner, in my view. Before it broke, had posted a very wise piece about how feminists should and shouldn’t react to Palin’s candidacy. The absurd and offensive Daily Kos story about Palin’s own most recent pregnancy was a complete gift to Republicans, and they were absolutely right to mention it in the press spin about Bristol Palin, because it makes Democrats look really stupid. Obama’s own response – that this is a private family matter, and anyway he was born to a teenage mother himself – is the only sensible one to make. It is tempting – and I’ve seen a lot of people succumbing to the temptation, in the blogosphere at least – to use the issue to highlight the weaknesses of the pro-life, abstinence education argument in general. I hope the Democrats on the campaign trail do not use this rhetoric; all it does is reinforce the impression of the Palins as a normal family to whom ordinary crises happen, and who then have to balance their own deeply-held beliefs against the needs of the moment. (And in any case, what influence would a Vice-President actually have on these policies? Probably less, in practice, than the Governor of Alaska.)

There are good reasons to attack Palin’s judgement – her definition of clean government seems flexible enough to allow her to pursue family vendettas from the Governor’s office. There are plenty of good reasons to worry about the McCain-Palin ticket; in my own area of particular interest, foreign policy, I confess I don’t have a terribly clear image of what Obama’s line actually is, but I have a good understanding of McCain’s line – and it frightens me – and I know and respect a lot of Obama’s people, which reassures me. So let’s stay with the sensible stuff, OK?

Sinn Féin’s Bairbre de Brún (who actually taught me French at school for a year) has sent me her speech on the telecomms package, translated from the original Irish. The money quote:

The European Parliament must act to delete the most regressive elements it has introduced into this directive. As it currently stands this directive opens the door for further involvement by businesses and state organs into the private use of communications networks by individuals. The protection of intellectual property rights must not be used as an excuse to allow personal and private data to be accessed by unaccountable bodies.

Previous responses logged from Saïd El-Khadroui here, and Heide Rühle, Gisela Kallenbach, Bart Staes and Chris Davies here and here.

1) Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane

Picked this up on a friend’s recommendation of the author last month, and I must say I was really impressed. Superficially it’s the story of a murder, and the links between the victim’s father, the investigating detective and the chief suspect, who were childhood friends; but it’s also a story of a Boston community, of families, of deep secrets and love and hate, with fascinating characters and a twist or two in the tail. Excellent stuff, and I will look out for more from Lehane.

Just about passes the Bechdel test, as we follow the victim’s final evening with her friends.

Fourteen panellists, including two women (both academics), discussing recent events in Georgia. As before, it’s a public event, but my notes are not for further distribution.

Giorgi Baramidze, deputy prime minister of Georgia: puts Georgian case. Claims that there has been no hassling of Ossetians in Georgia proper. (Yeah, right.)

Dimitrij Rupel, Slovenian foreign minister: rambles as usual. Sorry, I just find him annoying.

Jan Kubis, Slovakian foreign minister: very good (to my slight surprise) – says OSCE collectively failed to resolve this when he was secretary-general. Everyone should realise that if you don’t negotiate the other guy will eventually take unilateral action. EU needs to reflect on the fact that it was unable to exert effective multilateralism.

Carl Bildt, Swedish foreign minister: also very good. Sarkozy plan has not been implemented, hence EU summit tomorrow. Points out that threshold for Russian military action is now lower than we thought. Also boundaries no longer inviolable.

Marc de Brichambaut, OSCE secretary-general: a peculiar speech, saying that it is not all bad, given that Georgian electricity supply has not been interrupted. But we all have to consider situation. Blah.

Aleksandar Yakovenko, Russian deputy foreign minister: Russian viewpoint. Georgians were plotting genocide. We did not attack the pipeline (the problems were in Turkey, nothing to do with us). We have implemented all points of Sarkozy plan. We are ready to discuss future status of these territories immediately.

Matt Bryza, American deputy secretary of state: very effective rebuttal of Yakovenko. Russians are in violation of ceasefire agreement, which specifies only patrols near Tskhinvali, not troops in Poti or on the main highway. Yeah, the pipeline was not attacked, but other fuel supplies were interrupted. Yeah, Georgians shouldn’t have attacked Tskhinvali – and we told them not to – but they were being shelled by South Ossetian militia under effective Russian command. Russians have failed to turn up to meetings in peace processes in Abkhazia.

Peter Semneby, EU Special Rep for South Caucasus: not a very inspired presentation (I know him and he is much better in private). EU needs to discuss its relations with Georgia and Russia, and everyone should work on the conflict. Obviously constrained from saying anything of substance by his position and the situation.

Jean Lamy, from French foreign ministry: the most junior official present, and out of his depth. Energy is very important. French will work to achieve energy security, with the Commission, if they do their job properly, because it is very important. EU-Russia summit in mid-November will be very important.

Alex Cooley, Columbia University: calls for international administration in conflict zones, with resolution of status after 5-10 years. Not a bad idea and I think I actually proposed something like this for Abkhazia while at ICG.

Zeyno Baran, Washington thinktanker: wake up, Europeans! The Russians are trying to stop you from getting fossil fuels from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and your inaction in Georgia is making it easier for Russians to bully them. Also points out dangers of Nagorno-Karabakh, and she is dead right to do so. Also thinks that there is a likelihood of a gas cartel to match OPEC which will also screw the EU as Russia and Iran cooperate. And bear in mind Turkey may be under pressure too.

Oksana Antonenko, London think-tanker: she actually helped the Slovenians to broker dialogue between Georgia and Ossetia three years ago, and is deeply saddened by recent events. We have all failed in this crisis; it is no longer even a zero-sum game but a negative-sum game. We need a framework for all parties to sit around the table, if talk of new cold war is not to become self-fulfilling prophecy. But she doesn’t see who can offer that. Central Asia is now frightened of beng made to choose between Russia and the West.

Mustafa Aydin, Turkish academic: worried about being 13th (and last) speaker. Is EU going to develop a single policy? Its indecision is destabilsing. Georgia has been unduly punished for its attack on South Ossetia. EU needs to work on diversification of supply, not allowing Russian clutch on energy supply to intensify. Turkey is vital country in this. Montreux convention has worked for 72 years.

Baramidze: Russians should pull out of non-conflict areas, and stop ethnic cleansing; Georgia needs help to repair damage, including to our protected Borjomi forests. International investigation needed into what happened. We don’t want sanctions against the Russian people, but Russian government should be punished.

Yakovenko: recognition of independence was necessary for security to be preserved. (He was rather brief.)

Moderator asks about China. Bildt says that China will support territorial integrity, for its own reasons. Of course Central Asia important here, but internal Chinese issues even more so.

Moderator asks Bryza if we can go back to the table now? Bryza replies that we have no choice. We will always proceed from principle of territorial integrity. But we always have to find a way to negotiate compromise which includes political principle of self-determination (which is not a legal right). NB we always supported Russian sovereignty in Chechnya. Kosovo is different, different UN mandate.

Turkish diplomat from audience: apologises for foreign minister’s absence. Turkey is very concerned by all this. Georgia’s stability strategically important for us.

Journalist: 1/10 of all European imports at most could come from Caucasus. EU has to act more coherently on energy policy as a whole, includoing guaranteeing construction of pipelines. But interesting consequence of war is intensified rather than weakened commitment to the Caspian pipeline. Russians must now decide how they want the war to end.

Kubis points out that Chinese and SCC members in Dushanbe supported Russian “active role” as well as 6-point plan!

Summary: neither Russians nor Georgians covered themselves in glory here, but also neither did the EU which clearly has no firm plan or strategy. Several non-European speakers pointing out the dangers of Russian control of EU fuel supply. Bryza (who I’ve met a few times) easily the best of the panellists.

This is a public event, being webstreamed as it happens, but my notes are not for distribution.

First session – NB five blokes, one of whom (the moderator) is black, the others being middle-aged European politicians.

Janez Jansa (Slovenian Prime Minister) – keen on EU’s targets (as agreed under his presidency earlier this year). Only one to raise the development agenda – “the last third of humanity needs our help to catch up”.

Mirek Topolanek (Czech Prime Minister) – the most provocative presentation. Is a climate change sceptic! Thinks the EU has written policy at the behest of populism rather than real energy needs. Says nuclear is the solution, otherwise EU is hostage to the Russians and to its own poor infrastructure.

Ivars Godmanis (Latvian Prime Minister) – a rather rambling presentation, on the technical difficulties of creating an EU energy policy. Makes the point that nuclear power stations tend to have massive cost overruns.

Wolfgang Schüssel (ex-Chancellor of Austria) – punchy. Wouldn’t it have been better to hold tomorrow’s EU summit before the war? We all knew it was coming. As for nuclear power, not only do costs always over run, usually in an untransparent way (ask the British) but there just isn’t enough of it. We need to do more on renewables.

Jansa: the most emotional meeting I’ve had on this subject was with Caribbean leaders in June. They expect and need the EU to give the lead on preventing their countries from being destroyed by climate change.

Topolanek (gives up on English and goes through translator): if the EU’s common energy policy ends up looking anything like the common agricultural policy, better not to do it! As well as nuclear fission, nuclear fusion will be on-line in 20-30 years; until then, we have enough fossil fuel reserves.

Schüssel: there is a popular mood on this: people want to change their habits to be more environmentally friendly.

Moderator (Carlos Watson) points out that this is not true everywhere, esp eg Czech Republic.

Topolanek: it doesn’t matter. Every Chinese and Indian person wants to live like we do, and have their own car. EU’s role is insignificant in this.

Godmanis: 4000 new cars bought in Beijing every day. Then rambles about carbon emission quotas, which he thinks may not work but doesn’t explain well.

Jansa closes by saying that it is possible to have economic growth and reduce carbon emissions – Denmark has done so.

Conclusion: the Czech PM is clearly a dangerous loony. Jansa is not as bad as I had expected – particularly liked his lines about the developing world. Schüssel much the most impressive of the panellists; Godmanis the least.

Back in the old days, the three things you always had to remember to check before you left on a trip were Tickets, Money, Passport.

At least 90%, probably more, of the flights I take these days are e-tickets, where you get the paperwork issued to you at the terminal on presentation of proof of ID. It is quite unusual to have to worry about a paper ticket as I rush out the door.

Because it is much easier to get money out of an ATM on arrival, and in any case credit cards are almost universally accepted, I literally cannot remember the last time I went to a bank to get foreign currency before I travelled. Of course, a lot of my trips are to euro-zone countries anyway, so I don’t even have to engage “foreign money” gears in my brain.

Of the three, passports remain essential for most international travel. Yet here again, at least in the EU, things are shifting: my flight this morning from Brussels to Ljubljana is within the Schengen zone, so if my Belgian ID card had come through (I’m still waiting for it) I could have left all my various passports at home. If the American authorities were smart, they’d be looking at how to work towards some form of similar arrangement with other countries, rather than continue to inflict ritual humiliation on us at immigration.

In fact, these days it is not so much about what you should remember to bring, more what you should remember not to bring. Specifically, fluids in the hand-luggage; I’ve lost several cans of shaving gel to airport security in the last few years, not to mention the Macedonian wine confiscated because I was not going to risk packing it in my suitcase to get broken in the hold. It’s not just fluids of course – Rosi challenges us to identify a way of hijacking a plane using nail clippers – but that is how it has affected me most.

Hopefully the next generation will catch themselves on about security without losing the conveniences we have accumulated over the last few years.

Last weekend: Discworld.
This weekend: Bled.

38) Escape Velocity, by Colin Brake

Well, well: a Doctor Who book partly set in Belgium! Aliens, companions and the Doctor wandering round the Grand’ Place, the Atomium, Waterloo and the European quarter (one character practically walks under the windows of my office). Of course, I did the inevtable thing of checking for mistakes (it’s Boulevard Adolphe Max, not Rue Adolphe Max, and anyway I think he means the Boulevard Anspach; the EU district is described as southwest rather than east of the city centre, but otherwise the geography is right) but generally I liked being on familiar territory. The book was written in 2000 and is set in early 2001, so it is a time when we were already living here, and I imagined how I might have brushed past the characters on my lunch break (in those days I occasionally wandered down from CEPS in the Place du Congrès to the city centre for lunch).

The story: is a pretty standard alien invasion of Earth story, combined with introducing new companion Anji, which is always interesting, and a partial resolution of continuity I haven’t read with the Doctor apparently recovering from amnesia after causing some major catastrophe (I shall eventually get to whatever novel that happens in, but am not rushing to it). But I quite enjoyed the scenery, with different factions of aliens squabbling over their human allies, and some nice character sketches; the French millionaire perhaps a little too one-dimensionally villainous. There is lots of horrible slaughter, but that is often the way with alien invasions.

There were also a couple of nice nods to other parts of Who. Anji’s boyfriend is revealed as a big fan of the cancelled long-running TV show “Professor X”, whose more civilised British fans are disturbed by the arrival of Americans in their fandom via the internet. <irony> I wonder what Brake could have had in mind? </irony> And at the end of the book, the Doctor, Fitz and Anji leave the present day to materialise on a prehistoric landscape, and a shadow falls across the sand. Nice.

Fails the Bechdel test, I’m afraid; every one of the few conversations between female characters ends up being about a man.

So, that’s it: after five months of concentration, mostly on the daily commute, I have now read all but one of the Classic Who novelisations (the one exception being an unofficial fan publication which is not available outside certain circles in New Zealand). I’ll do a roundup post on the novelisations as a whole next, but this is the roundup of books covering Season 26, plus some observations about Mel, Ace and Seven.

33) Doctor Who – Battlefield, by Marc Platt

I’m not the greatest fan of Ben Aaronovitch, who wrote the original script, but Platt has taken the story and makes it work really well on paper. It makes you realise just how much of the TV version’s problems were down to poor direction, bad music and lousy acting. We get some lovely back-story for the Brigadier and Doris; we get just enough explanation for the Doctor being Merlin to leave room for further speculation without just being stupid; we get the Bambera/Ancelyn relationship decently treated as well. Interestingly Platt has broken the story up into four parts which more or less coincide with the episodes as broadcast, the only novelisation where I remember this being done.

An easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Ace and Shou Youing defending each other against the forces of darkness (in the book, we are not distracted by their awful acting).

34) Doctor Who – Ghost Light, by Marc Platt

After enjoying most of Marc Platt’s oter work, including his novelisation of Battlefield, I was looking forward to reading this. I’m afraid I was disappointed. Once again, I realise just how vital the direction and acting of the TV version can be; and the intensely visual and subtle original just loses most of its vitality and mystery on the printed page. In particular, we lose the striking visual appearance of Nimrod the Neanderthal and of Light himself, who comes across as just some random and rather dull megalomaniac with super powers.

Scrapes through the Bechdel test: in most of the Ace/Gwendolen scenes they are talking about Josias and/or the Doctor, and the one exception is when they fight, and are then interrupted by Control. A fight is barely a conversation, but I suppose it will have to do. (Mrs/Lady Pritchard appears to communicate with the maidservants by telepathy.)

35) Doctor Who – The Curse of Fenric, by Ian Briggs

Ian Briggs, on the other hand, does a masterful job with The Curse of Fenric, perhaps the most adult of any of the Who novelisations (in the sense of talking about sex). The most striking change from the TV original is that the vicar, Mr Wainwright, is explictly young (rather than Nicholas Parsons). Apart from that, the whole narrative feels very soundly rooted both in itself and in Who – particularly with Ace’s introduction in Dragonfire (which of course Briggs also wrote). For once, the Doctor’s-hidden-past motif actually seems to make sense rather than feeling like a bolted-on idea (the only other story that achieves this is The Face of Evil). An excellent read.

Also a comfortable pass for the Bechdel test, what with Phyllis, Jean and their landlady on the one hand, and Katharine, Audrey and the Wrens on the other, with Ace wandering between them.

36) Doctor Who – Survival, by Rona Munro

Well, a decent novelisation of what I felt was not such a great story. The whole thing seemed a bit more coherent on the page than on screen, and Ace’s reactions to returning to Perivale somehow made more sense here. A reasonable effort with unpromising material, with the Cheetahs’ planet much more convincing (and an interesting digression on the Master/Doctor relationship which I may copy separately). Passes the Bechdel test thanks to the Ace/Karra scenes.

I forgot to give Mel a valedictory write-up after finishing Doctor Who – DragonfireBang-bang-a-boom and Flip-flop. But she is sadly the least memorable Who companion on screen since Dodo, apart from Kamelion who barely counts, and that’s not really Bonnie Langford’s fault.

The big problem with the TV version of Ace is that, to be honest, Sophie Aldred was rather variable as an actress. She has highs and lows – in Battlefield she is particularly dire, but in both Dragonfire and The Curse of Fenric she is rather good. The plot concept of giving her a Past would have been rather good if consistently developed, but it feels a bit bolted on in the last season as it is. The character gets much better development in the New Adventure books, and Aldred herself is good though not excellent in the Big Finish audios: I guess I would pick out Colditz, featuring as a guest star someone called David Tennant, as my favourite of those featuring her so far; though I also liked Dust Breeding, The Genocide Machine and The Rapture. (Audio-only companion Hex has not yet convinced me.)

Sylvester McCoy was more fortunate with the scripts than Colin Baker; though Time and the Rani did worst of any Old Who story in my poll a few weeks back, I concur with fannish opinion that things had started picking up towards the end. Of the books, I really enjoyed Ian Briggs’ Doctor Who – The Curse of Fenric and Doctor Who – Dragonfire, with an honorable mention to Doctor Who – Remembrance of the Daleks. As well as the Mel and Ace audios mentioned above, there are a couple – Excelis Decays, Last of the Titans and the second half of Project: Lazarus – where McCoy does an excellent solo performance. He is criticised by some as being too comical, but I think he does bleak!Doctor rather well.

I’ll do a roundup post of the novelisations as a whole, but I think not tonight.

32) The Carhullan Army, by Sarah Hall

I got this because it won this year’s Tiptree Award, which seems to me to put forward some reasonable challenges to the Hugo/Nebula establishment. I thought it was a very good book. The setting is a near-future Britain, underpopulated and oppressed due to climate change and war; the narrator, a woman known only as “Sister”, flees her native town to join a community of women in the Lake District, and they spend the rest of the book preparing for their struggle with Authority (ie the government). This is the kind of story that is often done embarrassingly badly (see, for instance, Sherri S Tepper on occasion, or The Rising of the Moon) but Hall does it well; Carhullan is emphatically not a utopia, nor is it destined to be a permanent answer to an unjust society, and the leader Jackie and her colleagues are memorable figures. Some readers will be reminded of The Dispossessed, or The Handmaid’s Tale, and I guess it’s fair to say that if you didn’t like either of those books The Carhullan Army will leave you cold. But actually I felt it was also perhaps a response to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, where the protagonists are engaged in essentially a selfish struggle to get through their post-apocalyptic landscape to (if I remember rightly) the Lake District; the Carhullan Army have a more altruistic and redeeming purpose.

Not surprisingly, a rather easy pass for the Bechdel test. Also in response to ‘s query, the text in my edition starts on page 5 and ends on page 207, with several blank pages in between, so I reckon under 200 pages of actual story.

31) 1690: Battle of the Boyne, by Pádraig Lenihan

Another in the Tempus series of monographs (like Maria Kelly’s Black Death) on Irish history. Lenihan takes the 1 July battle and examines it in depth from military, political and above all psychological perspectives. His unpacking of what James II, William III and Louis XIV were really up to is most enlightening – he doesn’t believe James had aimed at much more than the restoration of Catholic rights before 1688, which chimes with my instinct, but then goes on to say that in 1690 William’s hold on Britain was still far from complete, and the Irish campaign was necessary as much as anything to satisfy the Westminster Parliament.

Lenihan’s analysis of the military styles of the kings on each side of the Boyne and their commanders is even more impressive: William and Schomberg were second-rate (and he gives examples from William’s other battles to support this), but James and Lauzun were third-rate – the best evidence of this being that the battle took place at the Boyne at all, rather than the much more strategic Moyry Pass, abandoned by the Jacobites without a fight.

The description of the Boyne battle itself is a forensic dissection, with Lenihan slightly (and unnecessarily) apologetic for the amount of detail, honest about the gaps and inconsistencies in his sources, and also honest about the fact that the most decisive moment in the battle was something which didn’t happen on the previous evening, when William was grazed on the shoulder by a cannon-ball; had he been killed at that stage, his forces would probably still have won the battle (if it went ahead) but certainly lost the war, or at least concluded it on much less favourable terms. But the fact that William, though wounded, carried the field, while James fled despite a surprisingly low number of casualties, was enough to set the mythology of the battle and the reputation of both men.

Having said up front that I really enjoyed the text, I am sorry to say that there are several aspects of its presentation which fall below the standards I would expect from a responsible publisher. The maps are too few, and are confusingly placed and labelled, which is something you really don’t want in a book on military history. As with Kelly’s book on the Black Death, the index has serious deficiencies. And James II’s own memoirs – a key source!! – are confusingly cited; it is implied that they are reproduced in Clarke’s 1816 biography, but it would have been nice to be clear. Despite all this I’d recommend the book unreservedly to anyone who already has a decent idea of the historical and geographical terrain.

A very nice day at Discworld yesterday, mainly for catching up with lj folks, some of them (, , and especially ) for the first time in the flesh; good to also see , , , , , , , and Charles, and anyone else I’ve failed to mention. Also I actually attended two panels, Jacqueline Simpson talking about the folklore of Discworld and Jack Cohen on sex and reproduction in Discworld. I was interested to note that both panels had a single speaker, in contrast to most sf con panels I have attended. (Also put me right about the early history of the game of Thud!

Anyway, good stuff, and I may try and attend for longer at some future event.

Last night was very disrupted by little U deciding that 3 am was the right time to wake up. She has been entertaining us all in her own special way for the last five hours or so. We are returning to Belgium today, but will be starting very slowly.

The Millennium Elephant on the nature of the Doctor.

30) Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling

A really good read, set in an early 21st century future but written in 1988. It is of course not intended as a work of prediction, but it’s impossible not to read it in that way now – yes, end of Cold War; no, didn’t see collapse of communism; yes, video-recorders obsolete; yes, non-state actors capable of major damage to industrialised society; no, rogue states on the whole not providing havens for “data piracy”. The passages explaining how fax machines operate seem particularly quaint – were they really so unusual back in ’88? But on the whole, this was an interesting envisioning of the future we are now in.

The central character, Laura Webster, is taken on a tour of the underside of her world – I hoped at first that the “islands” theme would be consistently maintained, as she starts on Galveston Island in Texas, then goes on to Grenada and then to Singapore, disaster following her as she goes. But she then ends up in the desert of northern Africa, which is about as far as you can get from being an island. (Though that is perhaps too literal – she is certainly pretty isolated in Mali.) I would have preferred also if a bit more of the climax had happened on-screen, as it were, given how much of the setting depends on the concept of the Net, the wired world in which everything is observed by anyone who wants to observe it. But these are fairly minor quibbles – it’s a great story of a world which, twenty years ago, was just coming into existence and now is pretty much here.

Bechdel test: a very easy pass, as Laura has numerous female peers. She also talks to her baby daughter, if that is allowed to count.