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.)

2) Brasyl, by Ian McDonald

My reading of this year’s Hugo nominees continues with another good ‘un, Ian McDonald’s latest. The setting of Brazil fits his lush, dense writing style so well that it is remarkable that he’s never set a novel in real South America before (his two books set on Mars portray a rather Patagonian version of the planet, but it’s not quite the same). We have three interleaving narratives, from the mid-18th century, the present day, and the near future (2030); we have peculiar variations of reality; and we have the jungle, both urban and literal, with its various hostile inhabitants. In some ways it’s deliberately less ambitious than River of Gods, which juggled ten different viewpoint characters against the background of India forty years hence, but the intermeshing of the different characters from their different time periods in the end comes across rather pleasingly. On to Michael Chabon next, but I’m going to find it difficult to rank this relative to Halting State. 

1) Doctor Who – The Romans, by Donald Cotton

I had been looking forward to this one, famed as one of the best Doctor Who novelisations, and I was not disappointed. Cotton has recast the narrative of Dennis Spooner’s TV script into epistolary/diary form: letters from Ian Chesterton to his headmaster, the Doctor’s own diary, letters from Ascalis the assassin and Locusta the poisoner, and contributions also from Barbara, the Emperor Nero, and Nero’s wife Poppæa (but not Vicki); the whole thing framed in a covering note by Tacitus (obviously written several decades later). Eye of Heaven, the best of the spinoff novels featuring Leela, also featured multiple first-person viewpoints, and I’ve read first-person narratives in other First Doctor stories (here, here, and partly here), but this is the only case of the whole thing being ostensibly done from written records (the Doctor having compiled everything and then left it behind in the villa for the archivists to discover).

Admittedly, as an actual story it’s no great shakes, and purists will be disappointed that we lose a lot of the funny lines from the TV version and one of its major comic elements (the two pairs of time travellers not actually meeting each other in their wanderings). But the whole thing is done for language and laughs; it’s meant to be fun, and it is fun, and that’s all you can really ask.

I discovered last night that one of my ex-intern’s ex-interns now has interns.

It’s not quite the same as grandparenthood, but still…

Sleep somewhat disrupted, but for those of you who saw me in Dublin at the weekend, the explanation of what I was doing there (and why I wasn’t there for very long) is this: I was giving the keynote speech at this event in Limerick on Saturday morning.

Limerick is a long way from Dublin, and funding restrictions meant I made the mistake of flying Ryanair, which I won’t do again if I can help it. Indeed, it took me longer to get from here to Limerick than it normally does to get from here to Macedonia, a point I made in my speech. It was miserable wet weather, but I had a decent Indian meal here on the Friday night.

Of course, part of the reason I accepted the gig was that it coincided with P-Con, which was very good fun – Hi to all who I saw there, too tired now to name-check you all but you know who you are. I was pretty tired by this point which is my excuse for totally blanking and failing to recognise the Guest of Honour.

Sunday night brought another tedious journey home from Charleroi airport, though as you will have noticed I used the travel time to do a lot of reading. Still pretty exhausted though even last night, and a small child has woken me up rather early this morning. Will be taking it easier for the rest of the week, if I can.

Just received an exciting message from WAYN.com (“the worlds’ largest travel and lifestyle community”, WAYN standing for “Where Are You Now”). Apparently no fewer than nine of its members have added me as a friend.

Only problem is that I don’t think I know any of the nine members in question. A couple of the names looked familiar but on checking they are fairly common Irish names and the WAYN profiles don’t appear to match the people I know.

WAYN is not quite as sinister and crap as Rapleaf, but unless and until some people I actually know start using it and recommending it to me, I’m not touching it. It looks just like Bebo, Hi5 or Myspace, with a little Dopplr added in; but I get all of that and more from Facebook anyway.

Edited to add: Ah, I see someone else has had invites from most of the same people!

44) Venusian Lullaby, by Paul Leonard

I wasn’t overwhelmed with the only other Paul Leonard DW book I’d read, but I must say this one really grabbed me. Jon Pertwee’s Doctor used to tell us that “Klokleda partha menin klatch” meant “Close your eyes, my darling – well, three of them at least” (see here, at about 1:20 in). Here Paul Leonard has taken that throwaway line and constructed one of the best alien cultures I’ve ever read around it; reminiscent a little of both the pentagonal creatures of At the Mountains of Madness (though a lot less evil) and David Brin’s Alvin the Hoon, but faced with an imminent world-destroying tragedy – this is Venus of several billion years ago, still habitable though steadily deteriorating. It’s set immediately after The Dalek Invasion of Earth and before The Rescue, so the Doctor is here with Ian and Barbara but no younger female companion. Leonard, like most writers, cannot write Hartnell’s Doctor especially well, but the story and the setting more than compensate. An unexpected pleasure.

43) Halting State, by Charles Stross

And so I start my reading of this year’s Hugo nominees (and am also now nearly finished Brasyl). I really enjoyed it a lot, though admittedly not every reader’s experience will be enhanced as mine was by discussing bits of background for the sequel with the author over the weekend. It’s a melding of genres, police procedural and cyberpunk, set in the Edinburgh of an independent Scotland in a few years’ time. The narrative voice is striking – three different viewpoint characters, but all told in the second person, as (quite deliberately) in a computer game. There are nods to all kinds of sf taproot texts, and an unnerving background theme of questioning reality. And Charlie’s prose seems somehow more under control than I can remember from any of his other books. My Hugo reading is off to a good start.

Thanks to a locked post on my friends-list, I now know where to eat next time I visit the Great Wen.

(Coincidentally, the nickname “The Great Wen” was coined by William Cobbett, who had a garden more or less where the Gerorgian restaurant is now.)

41) Doctor Who – Planet of Giants, by Terrance Dicks
42) Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, by Terrance Dicks

Two quite different Terrance Dicks novelisations here. Doctor Who – Planet of Giants was literally the last First Doctor story to see print, in 1990; Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth was from much earlier in the sequence of publication, in 1977. In fact they are respectively the last and the first Dicks novelisations of Hartnell stories.

I’m slightly surprised to report that Doctor Who – Planet of Giants is the better novel, perhaps because it had only three episodes on TV rather than six and therefore Dicks has had to pad rather than summarise; and his own powers of invention, once brought to bear, are helpful. We do miss out on the broadcast story’s key selling point, the visual special effects of the Doctor and company miniaturised to an inch in height, but the plot as a whole does hang together, though fans of Barbara will (as usual) complain that Dicks doesn’t do her character much justice. And once again, as with Doctor Who and an Unearthly Child, Dicks finishes by telling us that the Daleks are out there waiting to start the next adventure which is a bit tedious second time round..

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth leans a bit on the Peter Cushing film as well as on the originally broadcast story. Its most remarkable innovation, and improvement on the screen version, is the Daleks’ pet monster, the Slyther, which is much more terrifying on the page. But unfortunately a lot of the good bits of the TV story – the desperate chase across a deserted London in episode 3, and even the Doctor’s farewell to Susan at the end – are truncated and lose their effect. It’s still a good story but this comes across rather in spite of than because of Dicks’ efforts.

I’ve already read Doctor Who – The Rescue – probably Ian Marter’s best book – so will head for Doctor Who – The Romans by way of Venusian Lullaby.

40) [In Search of Lost Time #5] The Prisoner and The Fugitive, by Marcel Proust

This is Volume Five of the Penguin Proust, but actually includes two originally separate novels, called (not very surprisingly) The Prisoner and The Fugitive. But my March books list is already unfeasibly long, so I’ll list it here as a single entry.

The prisoner, overtly at least, is the narrator’s girlfriend Albertine, who moves in with him at the start of the book and (spoiler alert!) moves out at the end of The Prisoner, and then suddenly dies a few pages into The Fugitive. The translator says in her foreword that she thinks it entirely unrealistic to portray a young single upper-class woman cohabiting with a man she isn’t married to at the time period in question, even under the very secretive circumstances described in the novel (hence Albertine being described as a “prisoner”). I am not so sure. There was an awful lot going on under the radar screen in real life – indeed Proust is full of illicit and secretive love affairs, both gay and straight – and in a world where he thinks she is being sought after by every woman they meet, her secretly shacking up with him is not especially implausible.

There are some wobbly bits (again, the translator notes that Bergotte, a minor character, dies dramatically at one point but is being talked about as if still alive a few dozen pages later), but some great bits of description. That goes even more for the second part of the volume, The Fugitive, where the identity of the titular fugitive is much less immediately apparent, and the book starts off with loads of vicariously reported hot girl-on-girl action, and then spins out into a detailed and honest examination of the psychology of loss, with some very good sentences that almost qualify as one-liners. (But not quite. This is Proust, after all.)

Maybe I’m only now really getting into it, but it seemed to me that this was the most approachable volume yet of the five I’ve read, and I think I would actually recommend that someone wondering if Proust is for them should start here rather than with the first volume. It’s not as if the narrative is all that linear anyway. Having said that, those of you in the US will have to wait until 2018 to get this edition, or else get it shipped in from abroad.

39) The Embarrassment of Riches: an interpretation of Dutch culture in the golden age, by Simon Schama

A massive huge book this, Schama’s attempt to get inside the heads of the Dutch in the last sixteenth and early to mid seventeenth centuries. He is very convincing on the impact of natural as well as political/military disasters, on the formation of Dutch identity after the formation of the state, on the role of religion and the family, and the whole thing is beautifully illustrated with paintings and woodcuts from the period. (I was particularly grabbed by Schama’s enthusiasm for Jan Steen.)

However, I could have done with a bit more of the historical outline – the dramatic events of 1650 are actually better described by Russell Shorto, and it is assumed the reader knows all about William the Silent – and the only two maps provided are a contemporary small woodcut of the Netherlands and an illegible attempt to show where the brothels of Amsterdam were located. If you’re only interested in the culture and not in the context, this would be a very satisfying book; but I like a little more framework to hang the pictures from.

Dozens of Greek New Testament manuscripts discovered in Albania.

Occasionally, by accident or design, I read two or more books with a common theme and combine them into a single livejournal entry (indeed, checking back I see I’ve done that four times this month). And usually I combine my Big Finish reviews into multiple posts, as an act of mercy to the vast majority of readers who aren’t interested. But this time, my reading and listening schedules happened to throw up a Who novel and a Who audio play with an identical central theme, though very different in the execution of that shared theme.

The Council of Nicæa is a relatively short audio play in the Big Finish range, by Caroline Symcox (who I last saw at MeCon). It brings Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, his TV companion Peri Brown and new audio companion Erimem to the year 325 and the theological disputes over the nature of God at the eponymous Council. Supporting characters from history are the Emperor Constantine, his wife Fausta, and the competing theologians Athanasius and Arius.

The Witch Hunters, by Steve Lyons, is an early one of the BBC’s Past Doctor Adventures, set pretty firmly in TV chronology between The Sensorites and The Reign of Terror, bringing the First Doctor with companions Ian, Susan and Barbara to the village of Salem in Massachusetts in 1692, just in time for the infamous witch trials.

Both are stories in which there is no sfnal element in the historical context apart from the Doctor and his companions, and thus are very much rooted in the early traditions of the show. Both stories are a kind of response in Who terms to other writers – Symcox reacting against J. N. O. Kelly’s Early Christian Doctrines, Lyons more favourably to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Both of them feature a historical context where, essentially, the bad guys are the mainstream authority Christians and the listener/reader is invited to sympathise with the underdog (Arius and his followers/the accused "witches"). In both cases, the youngest of the Tardis crew (Erimem/Susan) is instrumental in trying to change history in the favour of the underdogs, in both cases (and this is hardly a spoiler) unsuccessfully.

Symcox takes more liberties with the setting (Arius is portrayed as a young man and Athanasius as somewhat older; in fact the reverse was the case), as she is writing a more standard Doctor Who story and also has less time to do it in (less than 100 minutes, compared to Lyons’ 282 pages). As often with Who, the Doctor gains the confidence of the authorities rather implausibly rapidly, which then of course accelerates the amount of trouble he and his friends get into. The two key elements of the story are the didactic part, informing the average listener who is (safely) assumed to know very little of the Council of Nicæa, and the character development of Erimem, who sides with Arius partly out of national solidarity (Arius was from Alexandria, Erimem is an ancient Egyptian princess) but more out of a sense of fair play. She pleads that because 325 is her future, she should not be accused of trying to change the past. It all worked rather well for me, certainly much better than The Church and the Crown, an earlier audio with a similar concept except that the Doctor intervenes to force history into our timeline.

Lyons makes the reader work harder; he has more characters to follow (not just four in the Tardis crew instead of three, but a large chunk of the population of Salem) and more background knowledge is assumed. He is also sticking closer to the historical sequence of events, though The Crucible is explicitly referenced, with the Doctor and crew taking in the first performance in Bristol in 1954, and the Doctor then returning with Rebecca Nurse to take it in again. Actually Lyons handles the possibility of changing history a bit less convincingly than Symcox, with even the Doctor rather un-Doctorishly seduced by the possibility of intervening to save lives. He also requires the Tardis to operate rather more accurately than we saw at this stage of the show’s history. Balanced against this, there are a lot of pleasing references to the first few television stories. The narrative has its own drama, which carries the book in the end, but the Tardis crew rather end up with the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Anyway, I found it interesting to compare and contrast between the two approaches – same basic idea, but different format and different details.

I’ve been musing a bit about Hillary Clinton’s recent travails on the question of foreign policy. (The details are of interest only for the truly obsessed, but FactChecker has a good summary and I link below to the Washington Post take on each issue.) I can’t speak to the Rwanda or China issues, but I do happen to know a bit about the other three areas where there has been some discussion of her activities: Bosnia, Macedonia and Northern Ireland.

On Macedonia, I find her actually the most convincing of the three. This was just after the start of the NATO bombing in March 1999; there were big problems with the management of the flow of refugees driven out of Kosovo by Serbian forces, and the Macedonian government was balancing the country’s own internal stability against the demands being made of it by the international community. Clinton’s critics find her guilty of some exaggeration because the border was re-opened for refugees the day before her arrival, rather than as a result of her negotiation with the Macedonian authorities. In my view it’s clear that her visit must have been part of the overall US and NATO strategy to keep the Macedonians on board (the extent to which Hillary Clinton herself was involved in shaping that policy is, of course, another matter), and the timing of the opening of the border may well have been explicitly linked to her arrival the next day. In politics, cause does sometimes follow effect.

On Northern Ireland, her “instrumental” role was less relevant to the formal political process, dare I say it, than my own (I was the central campaign manager for one of the political parties in the 1996 elections, and worked as an aide to our party’s negotiators from June to December 1996, in the course of which my most substantial contribution was probably a paper on decommissioning which I wrote jointly with Stephen Farry.) She is confused on some of the details, but it’s fair to say that she was one of the more prominent among many contributors, and by her own choice concentrated on building up cross-community links among women’s groups. Her visits to Northern Ireland are only part of the story here, as the Clinton White House also successfully empowered a wider range of people, pulling them into the wider discourse, and presumably she was involved with that. Her schedule reveals significant preparatory work for the Northern Ireland visits on her own part, which is laudable.

On Bosnia, however, the inaccuracy of her recent statements has been extensively documented; her reminiscences are over-dramatic and simply at variance with the facts. It’s a bit unfair to assert, as some have, that there was no physical risk to visitors to Tuzla in March 1996 – we did not know then that the deployment of US troops for ten years in Bosnia would pass without a single combat casualty. And I even have some sympathy with her defence that she is merely human and cannot be expected to get everything right. But I cannot escape the feeling that Clinton was more impressed by the way she was hustled into her plane’s armoured cockpit for the landing in Tuzla than about anything else that happened on the visit. Her most unnerving experiences – which clearly made an impression – were actually supplied by the US military rather than by any local factors, and her brief moments of contact with actual Bosnians were completely forgotten.

37) Doctor Who and the Sensorites, by Nigel Robinson

I was deeply underwhelmed by the TV version of this story, which fights off strong competition from The Web Planet to be probably the worst Hartnell adventure. Curiously, Nigel Robinson actually manages to smooth over the most awful bits of the narrative – the poor acting of the human characters, the poor characterisation of the non-humans – to the point where one feels that there is actually a decent sf tale in there somewhere, trying desperately to get out. Unfortunately the attempt is doomed to failure because of Robinson’s plonkingly awful prose style. Some day some keen fan will do a version of this – the Sensorites as they should have been written. Meantime this book is only for completists.

I’ve already read the next book in sequence, Doctor Who – The Reign of Terror, one of Ian Marter‘s better efforts, so it’s on to Terrance Dicks and Doctor Who – Planet of Giants next. Though I may stop off via The Witch Hunters.

36) Pass the Port: The Best After-Dinner Stories of the Famous

A collection of humorous anecdotes in aid of Oxfam assembled in the mid-1970s, and very much of its time (21 index entries for “Irish stories” but only 8 for “Jewish stories”). The “famous” assembled here are a peculiar bunch and say something very odd about who Oxfam thought would appeal to the connoisseur of after-dinner humour (also, this being a later edition, a number of the original contributors had died). Here, for instance, are the entries for a couple of random pages:

• The Late Lord Inman, P.C., J.P., President of Charing Cross Hospital; Liveryman of London; Author; Former Cabinet Minister and Chairman of the B.B.C.
• Fergus Munro Innes, C.I.E., C.B.E, Chairman, India General Navigation and Railway Company, 1973-78.
• The Late Air Chief Marshal Sir Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman, G.C.B., K.B.E., D.F.C., A.F.C., Vice-Chief of the Air Staff, 1953-57 (Prisoner of War, 1944-45).

I’m relieved to report that one or two of the jokes were actually funny. Here’s one I rather liked, though I think the delivery could be sharpened up a bit, though possibly Keith S. Showering (Chairman and Chief Executive, Allied Breweries Ltd.) was able to make it sing:

There were two Belgians and two Dutchmen who used to travel to work together on the same train.

After a while it became apparent to the two Dutchmen that the two Belgians had only one ticket between them, and on enquiring how they managed to achieve this, they explained that when the conductor was hear approaching from the other end of the carriage, the two of them left their seats, went into the toilet, and locked the door. When the conductor knocked on the door of the toilet saying, “Tickets please”, they pushed one ticket under the door, which was duly stamped and pushed back under the door again.

The Dutchmen thought this was a very good idea and the following morning bought one ticket between them, only to find that in their usual carriage there was only one Belgian. They told him what they had done and also told the Belgian that they presumed he must have a ticket as he was travelling on his own.

He said, he did not have a ticket at all and in answer to their enquiry as to how he proposed to manage to travel free of charge, he told them they would have to wait and see until the conductor arrived, but he had no doubt that he would manage it without difficulty.

As soon as the conductor was heard approaching the two Ducthmen immediately went to the toilet and locked the door.

A few moments later the Belgian followed them down the corridor and knocked smartly on the toilet door saying, “Tickets please”.

One Dutch ticket appeared under the door.

Sure, it plays to national stereotypes, and it would be difficult to get away with a joke about two men going into a public lavatory these days; but I travel enough on Belgian trains that it struck a chord.

Went to see B this morning: here is a rare picture of the five of us out for a walk (taken by the children’s Granny!)

Anne had got a massive chunk of lamb for dinner yesterday, which was just about enough for seven adults (including my mother, and the future Mrs , and the future Mrs ‘s parents, who mainly speak Hungarian). I found a really good recipe for it, as follows:

Slow roast lamb

Ingredients:
A big chunk of lamb
An onion
A clove of garlic
A little olive oil
Lots of fresh rosemary

Pre-heat the oven to 200°C (400°F).
Chop the onion and garlic into a roasting pan. Put the lamb on top. Brush the lamb with the oil. Lay the rosemary all over the lamb.
Turn the oven down to 120°C (250°F) and put the lamb in on a middle shelf; and put a dish filled with water elsewhere in the oven.
After an hour, turn the oven down to 80°C (175°F) and cook for hours – at least five, better six or seven. Check from time to time that there is still water in the dish.

The rosemary really did seem to percolate deep into the lamb. (I stuck some cumin seed on as well, but it didn’t seem to have the same effect.) The slow roasting technique really does deliver fantastically tasty, juicy meat; I hereby resolve to always slow roast a big chunk of meat if I have time (have had success with pork this way too).

Along with it I did yer standard boiled potatoes, the braised celery and walnuts which had been successful in January (this time over-catered rather than under-catered) and two more vegetable recipes, both of which I had to adapt slightly to fit my resources.

Spiced Peas and Yogurt
(based on the Georgian recipe for green beans and yogurt with the obvious adaptation for when you discover you have no beans in stock)

Ingredients:
400g/1lb peas
2 small onions
80g butter
1g cinnamon
3 cloves
pepper
2 garlic cloves
2g salt
1 small pot of natural yogurt
1g each of basil, tarragon, coriander, parsley, dill and whatever else you feel like

Boil the peas, and simultaneously sauté the onion in butter in a different pan.
Drain the peas and add to the onion along with the cinnamon, cloves and pepper. Cook on low heat for 10-15 minutes.
Grind up the garlic and salt, and mix into the yogurt.
Throw the other herbs into the peas, and cook for another minute, then turn into a serving dish. Pour the garlicky yogurt on top.

Of the various recipes I did last night this one was the most effort, but worth it.

The other vegetable recipe came from our faithful Good Housekeeping book, except that I used oregano instead of mint – partly because I suspected the peas might be fairly sweet (given the spices added) but mainly because I couldn’t find any mint.

Carrots with oregano and lemon

Ingredients:
700g carrots (chopped into sticks rather than chunks)
salt and pepper
rind and juice of a lemon
1 tsp light soft brown sugar
15g butter
3g oregano

Cook the carrots for ten minutes. Drain thoroughly.
Throw all the other ingredients into the pan with the carrots, toss until the butter has melted, and serve immediately.

That is really absurdly simple, but tasted very yummy indeed.

There were no complaints, which is a good sign.