I’ve celebrated my birthday on livejournal in past years by googling up relevant links to my date of birth. This year, WikiPedia has become so dominant that I can assemble an impressive bunch of dates just from that source alone. (It also of course provides a handy index for just how famous the individuals in question are, given the number of links involved).

Born the same day as me:

Glen Jacobs, aka Kane, wrestler and actor. There are Wikipedia articles about him in 20 languages. I am totally baffled by this.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste, actress and musician who has inspired articles in the Wikipedias of a mere eight languages.
Rainer Salzgeber, Austrian skier (three languages)
Ariel Sorín, Argentinian chess grand master (three languages)
Florbela Oliveira, Portuguese actress (two languages)
Pavel Eduardovich Lion/Павел Эдуардович Лион, better known as Psoy Galaktionovich Korolenko/Псой Галактионович Короленко, also known as

khaloymes

 , Russian musician and Slavic scholar (two languages)
Trevyn McDowell, South African/British actress
Tim Moore, member of the Michigan state legislature
Bruce Cruse, Australian cricketer
Andy Schmetzer and Walt Schmetzer, American twin soccer players
Mike Masters, another American soccer player
Monte Warden, an American country musician who features only in the German Wikipedia.
Ralph Kistner German footballer and now trainer at OSC Vellmar.
Stefan Ludwig, German politician, mayor of Königs Wusterhausen.
Klaus ‘Klausi’ Merk, German ice hockey champion goalkeeper
Susanne Brantl, German actor and singer
Alexander ‘Sascha’ Draeger, German actor and dubbing artist whose voice credits include Clark Kent from Lois and Clark, and Dipsy from the Teletubbies.
Eva Cobo, Spanish actress who figures only in French Wikipedia
Yves Cotten, Breton graphic novelist and artist
Leszek Kisiel, Polish economist
Bertrand le Guern, French/Polish businessman
Alf Kåre Tveit, Norwegian footballer
Oleh Volodymyrovych Salmin / Олег Володимирович Салмін , Ukrainian politician
Toomas Tõniste, Estonian sportsman and politician
呂孔維, whose name can apparently be written Lu Kongwei or Lu Kung Wei, Taiwanese comedian

Amy Biehl (d. 1993), anti-apartheid activist
Robbie Millar (d. 2005), Northern Irish restaurateur

and, fictionally
Grace Adler, as in Will and Grace.

Launched the day I was born

The Twenty-Fifth Hour, film starring Anthony Quinn (release date from French Wikipedia page)
The Leicester Riders, Britain’s oldest basketball club
La Fondation nationale Reine Fabiola pour la Santé Mentale, Belgian charitable foundation (now swallowed up by the King Baudouin Foundation)
Grajski biki/Tvrđava siledžija/Stronghold of Toughs, Yugoslav/Slovenian film
HMS Hermione
The MS Taras Shevchenko‘s Black Sea career
San Marco 2, Italy’s second satellite

Died the day I was born

Jean Alexandre Barré (born 1880), as in Guillain-Barré syndrome. Articles in five languages.
W.J.A. ‘Dave’ Davies (born 1890), rugby player
Roman Wilkosz (born 1895), Polish artist
Siegfried Charoux (born 1896), Austrian sculptor
Nicolae Cernescu (born 1904), Romanian chemist
(probably) Michael J. Estocin (born 1931), US Vietnam war naval pilot

See a gallery of some of these people and things here.

(See previous birthday posts for 2007, 2006, 2005, and an old collection of links on my website.)

These five Who books are all from 1967-68 stories, but from different ends of the chronology of publication. The first of these was in fact the very last of the official novelisations produced by Target/Virgin, in 1993; the other four were among the first five Second Doctor books, published between 1974 and 1978 by Target. Having been underwhelmed by my last clutch of Who books reviewed, I’m happy to report that all of these are good stuff.

27) Doctor Who – The Evil of the Daleks, by John Peel

This was the last official Target/Virgin adaptatation (a few remaining stories were produced in book form by fans subsequently) and therefore also the last Second Doctor novelisation and the last in the impressive series of five Dalek novelisation by John Peel. I have to say that I am among that heretical minority who regard the original story here as of less than top quality: the plot is absurdly convoluted, requiring both the Doctor and the Daleks to behave out of character, and Victoria as a new companion is awfully wet. But having said that, Peel improves on the original in a number of ways, giving the characters more comprehensible motivations, and embedding the narrative in the Dalek continuity he has been developing. I still preferred his others, but this is a good effort.

28) Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis

I have been unimpressed by Davis’ previous Cyberman books, which were nothing like as good as my fond memories of them. But in this case, writing up what is certainly the best Cyberman story, Davis rose to the occasion and produced what is probably the best Cyberman book. He even succeeds in injecting Victoria with some gravitas, making her both courageous and assertive in total contrast to her screen character (he makes her blonde as well for some reason). It is not bad at all.

29) Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen, by Terrance Dicks

This was the very first Second Doctor book, followed over the next few years by Doctor Who and the Cybermen, then Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors, Doctor Who and the Web of Fear and Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen. Dicks was still taking it seriously at this stage, and nicely fills out the four-part story into a good read. The interplay of motivations among the monks is very good, and Dicks was still in the habit of writing in tight third rather than TV viewer perpective. Victoria, alas, is very wet indeed, but there are a couple of amusing double entendres, eg “Thonmi woke up with a jerk” – hmm, yes….

30) Doctor Who and the Ice Warriors, by Brian Hayles

Hayles wrote up his own story here, and did a good job. It may be yet another base under siege, but the people on and off the base all have understandable motivations and reasons for doing what they do. In particular, one feels much more sympathetic to the novel’s version of the aggressive Leader Clent than to the original broadcast character. The Ice Warriors are suitably villainous, the Doctor’s techno-babble entirely convincing, and the computer itself ends up an interesting character.

31) Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, by Terrance Dicks

I had already read Ian Marter’s novelisation of The Enemy of the World and also Victor Pemberton’s of Fury From The Deep, so this is my last Jamie/Victoria novel. And it’s another good one, again from the time when Terrance Dicks was still taking it seriously. He wisely strips out a lot of the chasing up and down bits of the Underground, but actually puts in a couple of crucial scenes that weren’t in the original story – most importantly, the first meeting between the Doctor and the future Brigadier, but also the sinister initial encroachment of the Web on central London. It’s rare that I will say this, but Dicks has actually improved a good original story here.

So that’s it for the Jamie/Victoria combination. While Victoria, apart from in Doctor Who and the Tomb of the Cybermen, is the screamiest girl companion since Susan, the affectionate interactions between the Tardis crew are almost (but not quite) as entertaining on the page as on the screen.

All five of these books are medium good, and four of them are important as the perspective through which fans of my age first encountered the Second Doctor. The best of them is certainly Doctor Who and the Web of Fear, which wraps up one line of continuity (the Yeti and Travers) while setting up another (the Brigadier and UNIT). But all are worth adding to the serious Who fan’s library. (The same can’t be said for the other two novels of this run, alas.)

Having very much enjoyed the first three volumes of Brian Michael Bendis’ Alias series (1, 2, 3), I now discover that if I want to buy the fourth and last volume I will have to pay roughly twice what I paid for the other three combined.

Is it so much better than the others? Or just rarer, due to some quirk of the production and distribution process?

Five novelisations of Second Doctor stories, all originally broadcast in 1967. None of them specially good, and a couple which are pretty dire, but all very quick reading for my commute.

22) Doctor Who – The Highlanders, by Gerry Davis

The best Davis novel I’ve read so far, though this is not especially high praise. It’s one of Polly’s better stories, and of course introduces Jamie as a regular; a couple of odd changes of detail from the TV version, but this is basically a narrative that hangs together on its own merits. Unfortunately there is still something of a sense of the author writing down what appears on the screen.

23) Doctor Who – The Underwater Menace, by Nigel Robinson

This is very poor. It’s not quite as bad as Robinson’s novelisation of The Sensorites, and in the earlier chapters I thought it seemed quite promising. But the prose soon descends into his trademark clunkiness, and the story’s most famous line actually manages to come over even worse on the printed page than it does in the original.

24) Doctor Who and the Cybermen, by Gerry Davis

A relatively early novelisation here, but not an especially good one. Davis’ characterisation is poor (Jamie is thick; Polly is a girlie; the head of the Moonbase is from Yorkshire) and the science of the story still makes no sense. Davis’ style must have improved over the years – this and Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet are markedly inferior to Doctor Who – The Highlanders.

25) Doctor Who – The Macra Terror, by Ian Stuart Black

I enjoyed this more than I had expected to, chiefly because of Black’s characterisation of the Doctor, which seems to me to capture Troughton’s performance better than any of the novels I have read so far. We do, of course, miss out on the superb soundscape of the original (alas, the video is no longer available), and poor Polly ends up screaming a lot. But it’s a worthy attempt.

26) Doctor Who – The Faceless Ones, by Terrance Dicks

Another valiant effort here – Dicks actually makes a decent fist of a confusing and incoherent story, featuring the quiet removal of Ben and Polly, and also one of the greatest companions-who-never-was, Samantha Briggs. Dicks has Jamie somewhat intimidated by Samantha’s sexuality, which contrasts with what I remember from the original version. He also introduces the sonic screwdriver several stories early, and yet again finishes by promising that the next adventure will be better (though in fairness, each time he does this he is right). But in contrast with even some of Dicks’ own less inspiring efforts, it’s not bad.

In summary, your life will not be incomplete for lack of having read any of these! These are the five books featuring Ben, Polly and Jamie in the regular cast; it is remarkable how much more interesting Polly is as a character than the other two. Shame she didn’t stay longer.

If it’s OK for Salisbury Cathedral to put members of the congregation on their team, would it have been OK for the Ministry of Justice to put prisoners on theirs?

(Not that they needed it.)

The sole elected representative of the Newtownabbey Ratepayers Association, Billy Webb, has announced that he is joining the Alliance Party. Given that the press officer listed on the Association’s website, former councillor John Blair, has also (re)joined Alliance, I reckon that’s it for one of Northern Ireland’s smaller (and more harmless) political groups. Alliance has not been doing badly for new recruits recently.

Thank you all, you lovely people!

The source of my dismay is hereyou lot have reassured me that there is nothing really to worry about, so I shall forget about it.

Is this review “extraordinarily peevish”?

21) Understanding English Place-Names, by (Sir) William Addison

Picked this somewhat randomly off the shelves this morning. It does exactly what it says on the tin, breaking England down into regions and looking at the place names as a whole and particular individual cases of interest. It brought home to me how little of England I know despite my five years in Cambridge. It is interesting that so few English place names are Celtic in origin, apart from the obvious parts of the west and a few pockets farther east; also surprising that the Normans did not leave a heavier footprint on toponymy. I remain puzzled by the way that the Danelaw failed to really translate into later political divisions, but the book assured me that the pattern of Norse settlement based on place names is very visible. Anyway, an absorbing, quick read.

20) Doctor Who – The Power of the Daleks, by John Peel

John Peel continues his run of excellent Who books with this, the first story of Patrick Troughton’s incarnation of Doctor Who. It is a favourite of mine anyway – I cannot understand why fannish opinion generally prefers the later Evil of the Daleks – but Peel, equipped with David Whitaker’s original scripts (retrieved, apparently, from his ex-wife’s attic) and benefiting from some editorial decision to give him 250 rather than 125 pages to tell the story, has done an excellent job.

On reflection, it’s also because this is a relatively unusual Dalek story, presenting them not as a rival galactic empire to us humans but as in some way a dark reflection of our own desires about ourselves. The only other televised story that comes close to doing that is Robert Shearman’s Ninth Doctor story.

Anyway, Peel turns a good TV story (as far as we can judge, since it is one of the lost ones) into a good novel. An encouraging start to my reading up on the Second Doctor.

And so I reach the end of the first phase of this insane project, the last two novelisations featuring William Hartnell’s incarnation of the Doctor.

17) Doctor Who – The Smugglers, by Terrance Dicks

A fairly standard Dicks treatment of a competent Brian Hayles script. Perhaps because this is one of the stories whose visuals are completely lost, there is much less than usual of the feeling that the author is just writing down what he is watching on the screen. The best bits all survive recognisably – Ben’s disbelief that they have travelled in time, Polly’s gender confusion, Polly and the Doctor appealing to magical forces, the Doctor deciding to intervene. Worth the effort to hunt down.

18) Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, by Gerry Davis

This was the first new First Doctor book published by Target, and is of course both the last First Doctor story and the first Cybermen story. Davis made a number of changes, mostly minor and annoying, to the script he co-wrote with Kit Pedler. Most crucially, the Doctor’s regeneration at the end takes place in a coffin-like cabinet rather than just on the floor of the Tardis; also the year of the action is shifted from 1986 to 2000. Bizarrely, considering that Pedler’s involvement was supposed to bring a bit more scientific credibility to the show, the number of basic mistakes is legion – the South Pole is about the least suitable place imaginable to put either a space tracking station or a deadly nuclear missile, the terms ‘nova’ and ‘supernova’ are flung about with wild abandon, and the whole foundation of the plot makes as much sense as Velikovsky. Plus Davis is compelled to do some retconning of the Telos/Mondas confusion which actually makes matters worse. I enjoyed the screen version much more; it was easier to go with the flow ignore the flaws is the story.

So, that’s it for the First Doctor novelisations. The best ones are David Whitaker’s original Doctor Who and the Daleks, Ian Marter’s Doctor Who – The Rescue and Donald Cotton’s Doctor Who – The Romans, with honorable mentions to the other four by those three authors, John Lucarotti’s Doctor Who – Marco Polo and the three Dalek novelisations by John Peel. None of them is quite the real thing though: Hartnell’s performance was so strongly visual that it is impossible to catch on the printed page. The only way to really get a flavour of early Who is to watch it.

On to the Troughton era now…

16) The Great War: Breakthroughs, by Harry Turtledove

I got this somewhat randomly several years back in preparation for the WorldCon panel I chaired with Turtledove as one of the participants. I didn’t manage to read it then, though; bounced off the first couple of chapters. I have now struggled through it as part of my ongoing programme of clearing my backlog of unread books.

The book is, it turns out, the third of a trilogy about an alternate history war ending in 1917, where the US and Germany are fighting a bitter trench combat against Britain/Canada, the Confederate States of America fifty years after their victory in the War of Secession, and France. All the action takes place on or near the North American continent, so the fact that I didn’t read it before our panel on the future of Europe is no great loss. The major one of the “Breakthroughs” of the title is the penetration of Confederate lines on the Kentucky/Tennessee front by the US army’s new battle machines (known as “barrels” rather than “tanks” in this world), under the command of septuagenarian George Armstrong Custer, as a result of which the Confederate front collapses, the US re-occupies Washington, annexes chunks of Canada and declares Quebec independent, and the war and the book both end.

Turtledove has about a dozen viewpoint characters, telling the story from the point of view of the military and civilians affected by the war. US president Teddy Roosevelt pops into the narrative now and then, and the defeated CSA president appears at the end, but on the whole this is the story of the little people. It is detailed and well worked out, but didn’t quite grab me as much as I was hoping. I very much enjoyed Turtledove’s Hugo-winning novella “Down in the Bottomlands”, and wonder if the discipline of the shorter form enables him to concentrate quality rather better than in a trilogy of 650-page books.

Three good ones this time, though whether they represent two or three broadcast stories is a matter of opinion!

13) Doctor Who – The Myth Makers, by Donald Cotton

Once again, Cotton produces a memorable Who novel through a first person narrative: this time he has the poet Homer telling the story of how he witnessed the Doctor and friends interfering with the outcome of the siege of Troy. Homer didn’t appear at all in the story as broadcast (though Cotton has him absorb the silent role of the Cyclops played by Tutte Lemkow); constricting the whole narrative to a single viewpoint character does create some difficulties in telling the story, but basically it is a really good story anyway, and while it’s not Cotton at the utter peak of his form, it is surely one of the top ten novelisations. Cotton has taken the opportunity to restore as chapter titles some of the punning episode titles scrapped by the production team (eg “Doctor in the Horse”).

14) Doctor Who – Mission to the Unknown, by John Peel

This brings together both the single-episode, Doctor-less story Mission to the Unknown, and the first half of the 12-part Daleks’ Master Plan, which IMHO is the peak of early Who. It’s a dramatic story, centering around the efforts of the Doctor and friends to prevent the evil Mavic Chen from turning over the Solar System to the Daleks. This first section includes much scene-setting on the Dalek base planet, Kembel, and on Mavic Chen’s earth; excursions to a couple more hostile planets en route; the tragic deaths of key characters; and ends with the Doctor tricking the Daleks into letting him regain control of the Tardis and escape with Steven and former enemy-turned-ally Sara Kingdom. It’s a glorious story and Peel does it justice.

15) Doctor Who – The Mutation of Time, by John Peel

The Daleks’ Master Plan is simply too long to constrain inside a single pair of covers (at least at Target length), so Peel wrote it up as two separate novels, though you would be well advised to read Doctor Who – Mission to the Unknown first. Here again we have a grand panorama of Stuff Going On: the Doctor’s compatriot, the Meddling Monk, reappears; Mavic Chen passes from hubris to nemesis; the Doctor must accept another death among his closest circle. Peel’s treatment of the second half of the story takes slightly more liberties with the version as broadcast, mostly for good reason: the breach of the Fourth Wall at the end of episode 7 is removed, we get a bit more information as to what happens to everyone else after the Doctor leaves, and we get a Steven/Sara spark that will gladden the hearts of Hartnell-era shippers (including the assertion that they spent months together in the Tardis). He does the complex narrative more than justice.

I’d recommend all three of these. Next for me, since I’ve already read the Dodo novelisations, is Doctor Who – The Smugglers.

12) A History of Africa, by J.D. Fage

Since I changed jobs at the start of last year I’ve been working with two African groups, the Polisario Front of Western Sahara and the government of Somaliland. Part of my motivation for getting this job was that I wanted to do more on Africa; I feel that if you’re working in international relations and not working on Africa you need to ask yourself why not. But I confess my overall knowledge was not very extensive, and while I’ve deepened my understanding of the Western Sahara and Somaliland situations in particular, I wanted some more general information.

artw

 had picked up this book years ago somewhere, and so I worked through it over the last week.

I found it a pretty fascinating guide to the interlocking ebb and flow of kingdoms and empires across the continent up to the colonial period. The particular strength is in West Africa south of the Sahara, which I have been long fascinated by despite knowing very little about it, but he’s good on the rest as well. Two things I was particularly interested to read about: i) The first massive external colonialist intervention, based on greed and collapsing in mismanagement and ignominious withdrawal, seems to have been the Moroccan destruction of the Songhai empire based on the Niger river in 1591, which resulted in the impoverishment of the whole of West Africa. ii) The rape of southern central Africa (“Bantuland”, as Fage calls it) by slave traders at the start of the nineteenth century, and its subsequent easy penetration by European colonialists, was mainly due to the exploratory, trading and colonising efforts of Sayyid Said, the Sultan of Oman, who got so engaged with his successful African trade that he moved the seat of his Arabian sultanate to Zanzibar.

However, it’s probably not the best place to start for today’s reader; published in 1978, it therefore misses the crucial transitions in Zimbabwe and South Africa, and covers less than the first half (in many cases not even the first third) of most countries’ post-independence history. The unresolved Rhodesia and apartheid questions I think also make it more difficult for the author to assess the colonial and post-colonial eras in the round, and of course the Portuguese and Spanish had only just disengaged. Also, rather surprisingly, the Cold War is not mentioned at all. I’ve been doing a bit of digging and am interested to see John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the continent coming up in recommendations; has anyone out there read it?

Well, thanks to everyone who ticked boxes in yesterday’s poll. I found the results interesting.

First off, if you can read this, you probably also have Greek, Cyrillic, and Hebrew characters installed. Probably also Arabic, but I somehow screwed up the poll between Arabic and Armenian. I ought to have also tested for more exotic Cyrillic characters: the Macedonian/Serbian њ, the Altai ҥ, the Kazakh/Kyrgyz ң, the Siberian ӈ and the Sami ӊ. Next time.

Next in order are a clutch of South Asian scripts. I was surprised that both Thai and Tamil were a nose ahead of Devanāgarī, which is surely used by a lot more people than either of the former two. After Devanāgarī, Gurmukhī and Gujarātī are level pegging (as is, from a slightly different part of the world, the much less widely used Georgian), followed by Kannada and then Telugu (which is level with two scripts related to Arabic – Syriac and Thaana), and then Malayalam.

After that the four big East Asian scripts – the Japanese Hiragana and Katakana, and phonetic and standard Chinese – if you have one of these you probably have all four.

Next is Armenian, though I think this may be unfair – as mentioned above, I screwed up the coding. I would have thought that anyone who can see Georgian ნ can probably also see Armenian Ն. And then Korean Hangul, which I am frankly surprised to see ranking so low. The only other one that more than half of you could see was Tibetan.

Now we get into the exotica. I’m surprised to see Oriya just below the half-way mark. I don’t know much about it, but it seems to have a similar number of speakers to Kannada and Malayalam which scored much higher, and the script doesn’t appear to present any real peculiarities. Lao rounds out the easier South Asian scripts (with the curious exception, which I’ll come to in a moment, of Burmese).

Three of the next five are recently invented North American scripts. The Canadian Aboriginal syllabic script is surprisingly popular (not just with Canadians); it is followed by Cherokee. Then we leap back to Asia for Sinhala and Mongolian, but the next is the utterly artificial Deseret script of the Mormons. It is rather sad that this alphabet, in which apparently only four books were ever published, is visible to more of you than the N’Ko script used by millions in West Africa, or the Ge’ez/Ethipic script used by tens of millions in East Africa.

Then we get down into the exotic. I’m not surprised to see Khmer, famously difficult to learn, down so low; next is Runic, perhaps the easiest to code of the ancient scripts; then Bernard Shaw’s Shavian script. Next, on level pegging, a whole clutch of scripts: Burmese (which came rather late to the party) and the slightly superseded scripts of Limbu, Tifinagh and Osmanya, plus Linear B, Old Italic, Gothic, Ugaritic and the ancient Cypriot syllabary. Then another clutch of ancients – Old Persian, Phoenician, Kharoṣṭhī and cuneiform. In joint second last place are four Asian scripts – Hanunó’o, Tai Nüa, Buginese, Syloti Nagri – and ancient Coptic and Ogham. And finally five more Asian scripts, only visible to one person – Tagalog, Buhid, Tagbanwa, Balinese and Phagspa.

For the funny n’s, it’s not very surprising that everyone can see ñ, ń, ɲ, ɳ and ŋ. I am slightly surprised that not quite everyone could see the perfectly respectable Czech/Slovak letter ň and the Latvian ņ, and that equally many can see the pretty bogus ṅ, ṇ and ṉ (OK this last is used by two actual languages but one is spoken by only 4000 people and the other apparently by only 20). Likewise, just behind, the perfectly genuine Lakota ƞ is level pegging with the bogus ṋ. Almost 90% of you can see ǹ as well, even though I haven’t found a language that uses it.

It is a shame that the glorious n̈ (as in Spın̈al Tap) has not been more popular among typesetters. But I’m surprised that as many as a third of you could see ᶇ, n with a hook, and that a quarter of you could see ᵰ, n with a niddle tilde. It shows that people who work on fonts find it easier to grapple with the more bizarre and less used Latin-based letters than with real scripts used by millions of people.

How international is your font library?

We’ve spent the morning at the town hall, applying for Belgian citizenship. If you’ve lived here continuously for seven years (and we’ve been here for over nine) it’s pretty much automatic; you just need to get your birth certificate officially translated into the local official language. After handing those over, and then a lot of hanging round in the foyer, we were given a declaration to sign and told that the procureur would get back to us in a few months with instructions on getting new ID cards and passports.

I’ve always felt instinctively libertarian about nationalities. I already carry both UK and Irish passports, as all people from Northern Ireland are entitled to do under the Good Friday Agreement (ten years old yesterday). I occasionally wonder if my father’s birth in Malaysia, or his mother’s in the USA, might give me a shot at another citizenship or two. But the Belgian state has served us well over the last few years, especially with our family’s special needs, and it seems appropriate to deepen our relationship with it. We don’t have to give up our existing citizenships; the most serious obligation is that voting in Belgian elections will now be compulsory for us in all cases, rather than optional for local and European elections. But spending a few minutes in a ballot box once every couple of years is not exactly onerous.

There is, I must admit, a slight factor of ameliorating certain doomsday scenarios at the back of my mind. Neither of these is hugely likely, but to get a little more insurance against them is not a bad thing. The first case is, what if the UK leaves or gets kicked out of the EU? I already observe the frustration of my internationally-minded Norwegian and Swiss friends, wanting to pursue the same sort of career that I am in, but fundamentally hampered by the decisions of their countries to stay out. Sure, the EEA agreements are meant to take care of that sort of thing; but psychologically, it just isn’t the same. I don’t think a referendum on anything positive to do with Europe could pass right now in the UK, and until the situation is resolved (preferably by the British body politic catching itself on about Europe, rather than by leaving) we are on borrowed time. I have Irish citizenship anyway, but my wife does not.

The other doomsday scenario is the much discussed potential breakup of Belgium. I’m less inclined to feel that it will happen now than I was a few months back – we now have in place the government that won the elections last year, and it is to be hoped that the educative effect of working with his Francophone counterparts on day-to-day issues will mellow Yves Leterme’s approach. But in the context of the continuous hollowing-out of the Belgian state, citizenship rights are bound to go on the list at some point – there are plenty of examples of states with different internal citizenships around the world – and already our children’s care provision is dependent on our continued residence, not in Belgium, but in Flanders. Presumably if the crunch ever comes, existing Belgian citizens will be transitioned into the new arrangements fairly automatically, so it makes sense to consolidate our own position now.

Those two issues probably are not worth thinking about even to the extent of reading (let alone writing) two short paragraphs about them. There are lots of positive reasons to embrace Belgian-ness: the quiet and subversive liberal ethos; the excellent (if occasionally bureaucratic) public services; the diversity and quality of food and beer. But what really pushed us to take the step was young F. He was born a few months after we moved here, and knows that his mummy is English and his daddy is Irish; but he goes to our local village school, watches Flemish children’s television as readily as CBBC, and stunned us one day recently by coming home and telling us what he had been learning about “our six kings” (Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin/Boudewijn and Albert II). He feels Belgian more than anything, and has no reason not to. Once the procureur has finished with our papers, the legal state of affairs will be brought into line with his perception.

Three more books in my ongoing project, based on the last few stories of the 1964-65 season.

9) Doctor Who – The Space Museum, by Glyn Jones

The only one of these three to have been written up by the original author of the TV script. Unfortunately it’s not a success; writing decades after the first broadcast, Jones seems to have the same problem as the average viewer of the time in explaining what the story is actually about. His prose style doesn’t exactly sing either. He does inject an extra note of characterisation by having Ian quarrel with the Doctor all the time, but that too gets rather tedious. You can skip this in good conscience.

10) Doctor Who – The Chase, by John Peel

I was pleasantly surprised by this one, I think my first Peel novelisation (and certainly his first). The original story is one of the sillier efforts of early Who, including a comedy Dalek, not one but two very silly monsters (the Mire Beast and the Fungoids) and lots of utterly unconnected settings. Peel has used Terry Nation’s original scripts, plus some of his own historical research on the Mary Celeste, and come up with rather a good narrative, moored into later Who continuity (with references to future incarnations, the Draconians, etc). It ends up being rather fun.

11) Doctor Who – The Time Meddler, by Nigel Robinson

I have been underwhelmed by Robinson’s previous efforts, so I wasn’t especially looking forward to this. But in fact Dennis Spooner’s script is irrepressible, and for once Robinson rounds off a few corners without grinding the story down. Unexpectedly enjoyable.

I’ve already read Doctor Who – Galaxy Four so next are the intermingled narratives of the Myth Makers and the Daleks’ Master Plan.

8) The Last Colony, by John Scalzi

So, I’ve now finished all the novels on the Hugo shortlist, and can get started on the short fiction. Some of you will remember my exchanges with Scalzi on the first book in this series, Old Man’s War, which I took as an endorsement of kick-ass militarism and a mockery of the concept of conflict resolution. (refs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) Scalzi explained to me then that his narrator was unaware of the true facts of the situation, and indeed the political message of The Last Colony is one I have much more sympathy with: humanity is dragged into an unwinnable war with the rest of the galaxy by the lies of its own political leadership, and our hero ends up as the one man who can resolve matters. So no complaints on that score.

However, I find Scalzi’s narrative style rather wearyingly unvarying; almost all the characters speak with identical voices. And the plot is both complex and reliant on fortunate accidents of timing. There are touches I liked – Charles Stross makes an appearance as a genetically engineered super-soldier, and I appreciated the subtle "Commodore Perry" riff at the end of the book – but this is going fourth on my ballot.

It is six months today since B moved out; we were told yesterday that she is now at the point where they will move her from her current accommodation, an hour’s drive from us near the Dutch border, to the much closer residential centre where she stayed for respite a couple of times during the summer. She seems in reasonable form at the moment (which of course is why they are now talking about moving her); she had had a very unhappy patch a few months ago, but has returned to a more even keel.

For the rest of us, it has been six months of adjustment to a new family situation, tough occasionally but generally an improvement: far fewer messes to clear up, no constant vigilance on the bathroom and kitchen, much greater freedom for us to go on family outings (most often, of course, to see B up in Limburg). Sounds like she will move in the middle of next month, if the everything is right, and then we will be able to see her more flexibly: maybe even bring her back home for the occasional heavily supervised curry. It’s all a process of adaptation…

7) Rollback, by Robert J. Sawyer

Sawyer’s continuing presence on award shortlists is a mystery to me. His Hominids is possibly the worst book ever to win the Hugo (and yes, I have read They’d Rather Be RightThe Terminal Experiment, while not quite as dire, is certainly one of the least impressive Nebula winners.

So when I say that Rollback is the best book I have read by Sawyer, this should be understood as damning with faint praise. The prose somehow seems a bit less clunky: the tedious undergraduate-level discussions of philosophy and science are wisely constrained to the first half of the book; the two story lines – the central character’s unexpected rejuvenation, and the decoding of an alien message – come close to reinforcing each other.

Yet in the end, it doesn’t work. The biggest flaw is that while our central character is undergoing the dramatic changes of rejuvenation, and the consequent disruption of his life with his wife and family, we get very little sense of being inside his head. The second huge plot problem is that the alien messages come only once every 18.8 years (well, actually every 37.6 years): surely once contact has been established, one would set up continuous transmission in both directions, even knowing that there would be an 18.8 year lag?

Having said that, it’s a mediocre book rather than a bad one. Probably going last on my list (certainly below “No Award”); but I haven’t read Scalzi yet!

6) Saturnalia, by Lindsey Davis

Latest in this run of detective novels set during the reign of the emperor Vespasian. After a couple of less impressive efforts in recent years, Davis seems to be firmly back on form: this is an entertaining tale of family dynamics interacting mildly with high politics – Falco is called in to track an escaped German political prisoner, who coincidentally is the former lover of his brother-in-law. Oddly enough the actual murders are the least convincing part of the plot, but the rest is good fun.

5) The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

Another of this year’s Hugo nominees, and another good read. The setting is an alternate present where a large chunk of Alaska was colonised by Jewish refugees after the Second World War, and the Israelis lost in 1948 – there are other differences too, but those are the major ones. Now, sixty years on from those events, the Alaskan territory is within weeks of reverting to US control and its inhabitants face displacement again.

Chabon’s viewpoint character is a memorably seedy and depressed detective, trying to solve a murder which appears to be linked to chess and a Messianic Jewish sect, and at the same time dealing with his own professional and family dilemmas. The tenuous society of Sitka is well depicted at all its levels. In places it’s terrifically sad. I was a bit dubious about the portrayal of conspiratorial politics at the highest political level, but perhaps that was part of the point.

However, it’s not going at the top of my Hugo list; I don’t think it is sfnal enough. Apart from the ahistorical setting, there is no sfnal content (well, a couple of miracles are hinted at, but I’m not sure that counts). The genre of this novel is detective, not sf; the setting is not much more counterfactual than Agatha Christie’s country houses, or Lindsey Davis’ richly imagined and researched Rome, or Ellis Peters’ medieval Shrewsbury (which also gets the very occasional miracle, but that doesn’t make it fantasy).

Don’t get me wrong: I liked the book enormously. The setting seemed to me a very thought-provoking response to the history of Jews, in America in particular, since 1940, far better than the other attempts I’ve read recently. I’ll probably end up ranking it ahead of the other two nominees which I haven’t yet read and of which I don’t have huge expectations. But, while in a lot of ways it may be the best novel of the three I’ve read so far, it lacks the sensawunda that I got in spades from both Halting State and Brasyl, so loses my vote on that account.

Well, I enjoyed it. There’s no harm in being funny; I enjoyed the Doctor and Donna constantly missing each other and then their silent dialogue. But I was especially impressed with Donna’s character’s perception that the Doctor has changed – one of Tom Baker’s insights into his time on the programme was that his Doctor couldn’t really change or develop, and RTD has modified that a bit. I didn’t see the plot (as some have) as an attack on fat people. I did like the appearance of That Blonde Girl at the end.

From my friends list, mostly with spoilers: Generally positive to enthusiastic notes from here, here, (succinctly) here, here, and (I think) here. A moderate view from here. Rather less enthusiasm from here (also spoilers for last night’s Torchwood), here, here, and especially here.

I see that the hand of history has fallen on Brian Cowen’s shoulder. He has been seen in dubious company before now!

Right, now for Doctor Who…

Various sources are reporting the death of Johnny Byrne, who wrote much of the hit series All Creatures Great and Small (based on the pseudonymous reminiscences of Yorkshire vet “James Herriot“, and starring among others a youthful Peter Davison) and also wrote three Doctor Who stories, The Keeper of Traken, Arc of Infinity and Warriors of the Deep (two of which also starred an only slightly less youthful Peter Davison).

Mercifully, few Who fans will be aware of Byrne’s peculiar participation on Usenet newsgroups discussing the break-up of Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s. He was determined to demonstrate the evils of the 1941-45 Croatian regime, which were indeed manifest and horrible, but went too far in appearing to argue that the deeds of the Croats fifty years before excused or exonerated the activities of the Serbs in the more recent conflict. The archives are all there on Google

Well, that was an improvement over last year’s finale. In End of Days, we had a really silly demon monster and the utterly unconvincing temporary deaths of Rhys and Jack; we knew they were going to come back to life again, so any dramatic tension was lost. But this time round we lose both Toshiko and Owen, apparently permanently – and for the sake of dramatic integrity, I rather hope it is permanent; it would be OK to bring them back as flashbacks or ghosts, but not to revive them – you can do that once successfully (as TW did this season with Owen) but no more often than that. The worst bit of this episode was the dismal acting of Lachlan Nieboer as Jack’s brother; and there was a lot else that could have gone wrong, and didn’t.

It’s interesting to reflect that the original run of Doctor Who killed off two regular characters in its third season, and then of course changed the lead actor in the fourth; there may be a natural time limit to these things (unless you are Tom Baker). It’s been a grim old time all round in Who and its spinoffs, what with Kylie being killed off in Voyage of the Damned as well.

This has been a much better season than the first one. The writing has been better, the central concepts better, the actors seemed more in their roles (again, a huge contrast between tonight’s episode and End of Days). The only episode that didn’t work especially well for me was Out of the Rain, the one with the circus troup materialising from ancient film records. (And my second least favourite was Fragments, which had the same director, Jonathan Fox Bassett.) I enjoyed pretty much all of the others.

Both Adam and Something Borrowed leant to an extent on Buffy episodes (obviously, Superstar and Hell’s BellsA Day In The Death was fantastic.

Adrift, for obvious reasons, was the episode that hit closest to home for me emotionally. Apart from that, I really liked the fact that a bit more care seemed to have gone into constructing the Owen/Tosh, Gwen/Rhys[/Andy], Jack/Ianto[/John][/Gray] character arcs; particularly the first of these, where there were several episodes showing this relationship as one which was changing and developing (Adam, Dead Man Walking, and of course Exit Wounds). A fan who had only seen the second series would find it rather difficult to believe that Gwen had ever had a fling with Owen; let alone that Ianto had his girlfriend hidden in the basement.

Anyway, I liked most of the first series of Torchwood (apart from the very last episode), yet felt the need to be apologetic about it at the time; I don’t feel anything like as apologetic about liking the second series.

(Various other people have done their reaction posts while I’ve been writing this. I would particularly recommend , here. Though the comment threads here get amusing too.)

Anyway, roll on tomorrow at 1920 our time, 1820 for you in the UK and Ireland!

3) Doctor Who and the Zarbi, by Bill Strutton
4) Doctor Who and the Crusaders, by David Whitaker

These were the other two Doctor Who books published in the 1960s, after the initial success of Whitaker’s Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. Both feature Hartnell’s First Doctor with original companions Ian and Barbara, and relatively new girl Vicki.

Doctor Who and the Zarbi was based on the story now generally called The Web Planet, which crashes and burns spectacularly awfully on screen because today’s viewers cannot take the production values seriously. The book is a bit better, because the printed page and the reader’s imagination, rather than the unforgiving camera, supplies the details of the various non-human races in conflict on the planet Vortis. In principle it makes a good sf story, perhaps the best sf story, in terms of the norms of the genre, from the whole Hartnell era.

The book does suffer from a couple of weaknesses. Most bizarrely, and uniquely, the central character is referred to as “Doctor Who” rather than “the Doctor” throughout, and the Tardis loses the definite article, as if Tardis was just the name of the vessel. Also, in places the book feels uncomfortably like what it is, a TV script cast in different format, and one feels that Strutton is just writing what appeared to the viewer on the screen. Having said that, though, the book is still better than the original TV story.

Doctor Who and the Crusaders is the only one of the 1960s Who novels to have been drawn from a four-part rather than seven-part story, and Whitaker makes full use of the extra space this gives him to expand on his own original material. His opening paragraph is pretty memorable:

As swiftly and as silently as a shadow, Doctor Who’s Space and Time ship, Tardis, appeared on a succession of planets each as different as the pebbles on a beach, stayed awhile and then vanished, as mysteriously as it had come. And whatever alien world it was that received him and his fellow travellers, and however well or badly they were treated, the Doctor always set things to rights, put down injustice, encouraged dignity, fair treatment and respect.

Despite the solecisms of “Doctor Who” and “the Tardis” (which are fortunately not repeated later in the text), it’s a good start, and the whole story fees more embedded in an ongoing narrative than does Doctor Who and the Zarbi. This is partly because Whitaker makes the Ian/Barbara relationship even more explicitly romantic than in his previous book. But it’s also because there is a good sense of geography, of this Palestine, despite its rather implausible woodlands, being a place with real towns filled with merchants, robbers and warlords.

The biggest loss from the TV version is the rhythmic, indeed iambic, structure of some of the set pieces; but I guess that would not read as well as it sounded. However, Ian’s humanistic discussion with Saladin, and the decency and chivalry of the Saracen leaders, remain high points of the story. Well worth hunting down if you can find it.

TIME magazine has a short feature about us (mainly about the boss) this week.

(I was trying desperately to think of some appropriate play on words involving the phrase “in time”, but, alas, inspiration failed.)