I really liked The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy. Perhaps it helped that, by total coincidence, I was wandering around a supermarket myself while listening to it, but I felt the balance of humour and drama, of life-threatening horrors and time paradoxes while at the same time not taking itself too seriously, worked really well. Tremendous fun.

I was less impressed with The Green-Eyed Monsters. A lot of the humour was based on the idea that men can’t look after children. The plot didn’t really make much sense, and the denouement was fairly bathetic.

The Dance Of The Dead, however, was a real return to form: a claustrophobic setting of the doomed space ship, the return of the Ice Warriors, and psychic possession – all worked really well for me.

The Mirror Effect, exploring the inner psychologies of Benny and the other regular characters from the series, could easily have descended into self-indulgence, but manages to avoid it through good writing and good acting. The ending perhaps a little over the top, but otherwise this one held together.

In summary: The Greatest Shop In The Galaxy and The Dance Of The Dead excellent, The Mirror Effect OK, and The Green-Eyed Monsters less impressive. Also of course The Plague Herds of Excelis is set in the middle of this sequence.

I’ve always been fascinated by linguistics – how it is that the same word can come up in different languages with the same meaning: English mother, German Mutter, Latin mater, Greek μήτηρ, Russian мать. But occasionally you get interesting variations of meaning for what is essentially the same word. The English word town is a cognate of Dutch tuin and German Zauntuin means “garden” and Zaun means “fence”. These must all come from a root word something like tūn, which is the Old English / Anglo-Saxon word for an enclosed space. So in English and Dutch, the word came to mean two different types of enclosure, one inhabited by people and the other by plants; whereas in German it came to mean the enclosure itself.

There aren’t many cognates of this word outside the Germanic language family, but there is one: the Celtic root represented by the Irish word dún, meaning fort, and the Welsh word dinas meaning city, which crops up in all kinds of places. Old English / Anglo-Saxon adopted this word, in the context of hill-forts, to mean the hills themselves; and as tūn became our word “town”, dūn became “down” as in the North and South Downs. (County Down is directly from the hill-fort at Downpatrick, Dún Pádraig.) The adverb describing a descent from the hill, “off the down”, ofdūne, turned into adown and eventually became our adverb down. So “down” and “town” are originally the same word, a legacy of iron age enclosures and linguistic melding.

καὶ ἐξελθοῦσαι ἔφυγον ἀπὸ τοῦ μνημείου· εἶχεν γὰρ αὐτὰς τρόμος καὶ ἔκστασις, καὶ οὐδενὶ οὐδὲν εἶπον· ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ. (Mark 16:8)

Last year I started a habit of posting bits from the Greek New Testament at Christmas and Easter. Which is nice and clever, but doesn’t really take you very far. I feel like something a bit different this Easter morning: the above is the original end of the Gospel according to Mark: And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid.

Mark is of course great in his blunt style of writing which none the less always suggests that he knows more than he is letting on. (All four of the Gospels have their pleasing quirks: Matthew requires footnotes for his frequent Old Testament allusions, Luke is just very well written compared to the others, and John takes the whole narrative from a completely different direction.) And I was struck by the use of the word ‘fear’ both here and two verses earlier: Be not affrighted: Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here

In fact the words used in Greek are subtly different. In 16.6 the word the angel uses to the women is the verb ἐκθαμβέω, to be astonished or amazed or gobsmacked or dumbfounded; in 16.8 it is φοβέω, which is of course related to the English word “phobia”, to fear. Don’t be surprised, says the angel; but the women are terrified.

In the end, there’s only so much enlightenment to be gained from poring over the original Greek and trying to nail down facts. The Gospels weren’t written as historical accounts, but as didactic documents, which tried to capture the experiences reported in ways that would make sense to worshippers a few decades later. We’ll never know exactly what the apostles experienced that day, and the days following. The details in the New Testament are contradictory (and in a couple of cases unconvincing). But all four gospels make it clear that Jesus’ body had physically disappeared from the tomb; and the other three (plus the later postscript to Mark, plus Acts and various allusions elsewhere) make it equally clear that many of the apostles experienced a personal encounter with him in the following few days and weeks, and that this direct experience of the risen Christ was the basis on which Christianity consolidated and developed to what it is today.

35) Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Jack Dann

Not really very satisfied with this collection of “Jewish sf” stories. Perhaps I am over-sensititve to ethnic stereotypes, even by the ostensibly stereotyped, as a result of too much exposure to paddywhackery myself. It may seem an odd criticism, but I found it much more ethnocentric than I had expected: despite a recurrent theme of various non-human creatures claiming to be Jewish, in fact most of the stories totally play to stereotypes based on the mid-twentieth century Jewish experience in the United States, rather than on any broader exploration of Jewish identity or history. I’d be surprised if a European or Israeli Jew felt there was a lot here they could identify with. There is a truly awful story by George Alec Effinger. Rather disappointing.

Prompted by here and here we went up the road to try La Rusticana in Heverlee last night. Well, on the good side, the food was indeed excellent, the complimentary starters fantastic, my penne boscaiola really heavenly. On the less good side, Anne’s after-dinner cup of tea was made with heavily salted water (“Sorry! We used the wrong kettle!”), they initially forgot to bring our tiramisu (which was indeed delicious when it finally arrived), and two euro were mysteriously added to the bill (I don’t normally check, but I couldn’t actually read the total, added the numbers up for myself, and discovered the mistake). So good marks for food, and considering what and have said, we may just have been there on a bad night for service.

I’m fairly steaming through these; at my reading speed, I can basically get through half a Who book on each leg of my commute. (I’m not working tomorrow or Monday, though, so you will be spared for the next few days.)

33) Doctor Who – Marco Polo is certainly the best of John Lucarotti’s three Who books (the other two being Doctor Who – The Aztecs and Doctor Who – The Massacre). Possibly the need to be fairly concise – cutting down from a seven episode story, rather than writing up from four – made a difference. It’s a cracking good story anyway, and the fact that we have only sound rather than video records of it makes Lucarotti’s presentation all the more valuable. He has a rather peculiar fascination with detailing the various different Chinese prawn dishes that the Tardis crew consume en route, but this of course just adds to the depth of the setting. Really rather a good one.

34) Doctor Who and the Keys of Marinus, by Philip Hinchcliffe from Terry Nation’s script, was only the third new Target First Doctor story (after Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet, Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and the three 1960s ones) and only one more was published in the next four years. It seemed an odd choice at the time, and it seems an odd choice now; I can only assume that Hinchcliffe had some particular personal interest in the story (this was his third and last – so far – novelisation, the other two being the much more obvious choices of The Masque of Mandragora and The Seeds of Doom). It starts off somewhat juvenile in style, but picks up as Hinchcliffe gets into the story. The third episode (of six) drags a bit, but it’s a decent effort.

I’ve already read Doctor Who – The Aztecs, so next up is Doctor Who – The Sensorites. Next week.

32) Doctor Who – The Edge of Destruction, by Nigel Robinson

Robinson has taken a two-episode story and padded it out with some interesting new material of Ian and Barbara exploring the depths of the Tardis. Unfortunately, Robinson’s own prose style is thunderously bad in places. For completists only.

26) Match of the Day, by Chris Boucher
27) Last Man Running, by Chris Boucher
28) Corpse Marker, by Chris Boucher
29) Psi-Ence Fiction, by Chris Boucher
30) Drift, by Simon A. Forward
31) Eye of Heaven, by Jim Mortimore

It’s interesting that the six Doctor Who spinoff novels featuring the Fourth Doctor and Leela are all from the more recent BBC series of Past Doctor Adventures rather than the earlier Virgin series of Missing Adventures; that all of them are set before K9’s arrival in Who continuity; and that four of the six are by Leela’s creator, Chris Boucher, who also wrote three of the five TV stories featuring her but not the metal dog. Obviously K9 is more successful with Romana or Sarah Jane (each of the Fourth Doctor’s departing female companions having ended up with one).

The four Boucher novels include two rather less exciting tales which appear to have slipped out of Blake’s Seven (for which Boucher was also script editor), and two rather good retakes of stories he wrote for Who. They all share an interesting pair of characteristics: Boucher writes Leela really well, and the Doctor really badly. Of course, like many an artist, he loves his own creations, and even slips a minor Blake’s Seven character into one of the books. But he finds it difficult to allow Leela to change or be changed by the passage of events – Jim Mortimore manages this much better in Eye of Heaven, discussed further below – so while his books are an adequate to excellent nostagia romp, they are not really great literature.

The most recent of the books, Match of the Day, illustrates this well. In a society obsessed with fighting (reminiscent of The Game, which came out at about the same time) Leela becomes, believe it or not, a duelling champion, with the Doctor rather implausibly her agent. A few well-aimed digs at the cult of celebrity, and the effective portrayal of Leela, rather sink into a peculiar writing idiom (adopted only for some passages, but still very annoying), the very unevenly sketched world and society in which our heroes find themselves for this adventure, and a plot which barely hangs together.

Last Man Running, which was Boucher’s first effort for the Past Doctor Adventures, is a little more successful, though the setting – Doctor and Leela bump into a survey team in a hostile environment – is very base-under-siege, and you can almost see the sets wobble. Leela herself gets some good lines and action, but then we discover that she is the ultimate warrior in a rather confusing conclusion. Apparently a lot of fans were disappointed when this came out, and I can see why.

Corpse Marker takes us to Kaldor City and the three surviving crew members from The Robots of Death, several years on, in a complex web of political intrigue and threat. Once again Leela gets some good bits, and for once Boucher’s world-building is on form: Kaldor City feels pretty real, and there are a number of very visual moments. One of the characters actually has escaped from Blake’s Seven, but I think I missed that particular episode. My caveats about Boucher’s portrayal of the Doctor still apply, though.

Psi-Ence Fiction was the most difficult of these titles to track down, and is certainly the best of the four Boucher novels. It is something of a re-take of Image of the Fendahl, with research in contemporary Britain (2001 rather than 1978, of course) unlocking dangerous space-time anomalies and tapping into the plans of sinister entities. The setting this time round is a university campus, a familiar setting which liberates Boucher from trying too hard at world-building (as noted above, not his strongest point), as he can rely on smart-aleck students, infighting academics, and the local police trying to sort things out. Leela, as ever, excels; the biggest problem with the book is the resolution, where the Tardis itself plays an unexpected role, and the ending is a bit of a cop-out. But it was a good read.

If Match of the Day and Last Man Running are escaped episodes of Blake’s 7, Drift, by Simon Forward, has escaped from the X-Files. Here we have a US special forces military operation in a snowbound New Hampshire village, which the Doctor and Leela get embroiled in. There are also two CIA agents (which is a mistake; they should be FBI) on the case with their own secret. There’s some great characterisation of a dysfunctional family (though not really of the Doctor or Leela), and lots of people get killed, yet at the end of the book one feels that not an awful lot has happened. The cold snowbound setting is reminiscent of Kim Newman’s Time and Relative, which was apparently published almost simultaneously.

I saved what is probably the best of these until last: Eye of Heaven, by Jim Mortimore, is a tale of Victorian adventure set in the South Pacific, specifically on and around Rapa Nui/Easter Island. The entire book is told in the first person, but by different narrators, Leela getting I guess about half of the chapters and most of the rest going to the English members of their expedition, though two are told from the Doctor’s point of view – not hugely successfully, but I’ve seen worse. Leela’s on-screen encounters with the England of bygone days were a delight, and the clash of cultures is equally fun here. The book’s narrative structure, interweaving chapters from different sequences of the narrative, is a successful experiment. There are a couple of wobbly plot concepts – the Doctor’s decision to sponsor the expedition, Leela’s actual arrival on the island, the bit with the, er, aliens – but the ride is great value. It’s a bit surprising that this was the very first Fourth Doctor / Leela novel to be published – the Virgin Missing Adventures never went to this time period – and a bit sad that none of the subsequent five is as good.

Leela could easily have ended up as a one-joke character (cf the Sixth Doctor’s penguin-shaped companion, Frobisher; or indeed *snark* Jo Grant). That she didn’t in the TV series is testimony not only to the writers but also to Louise Jameson, who overcame Tom Baker’s hostility to give a memorable performance. But I suspect that sustaining her in print over the length of a new BBC novel is rather a tough task, which may explain why it has been attempted a) rarely and b) mainly by Chris Boucher, her creator. Still, when it works – as with Eye of Heaven, Psi-Ence Fiction and to an extent Corpse Marker – it works well.

The Game was a rather nice parable of the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa ending a war; not a lot more to say about the plot than that. Several interesting things about the form rather than the content, though. First off, the six-part framework is much more effective than BF’s usual four parts, and imposes a certain discipline on the storytelling. Second, the setting is very close in concept to my day job, but this is a broad brush portrayal, not a didactic exercise, so I forgive the blurring of details. Third, and most important, we have the return of William Russell to Doctor Who after forty years, as interplanetary negotiator Lord Darzil Carlisle – a memorably flawed character, whose relationship with both Nyssa and the Doctor turns out to be the real story here.

Dreamtime is the first trip in the Tardis for the Seventh Doctor’s new companion Hex: some splendid audio-scapes conveying the double weirdness of the landscape – Uluru is bizarre enough in the first place, but to find it on an atmospheric asteroid is extra value. I’m not sure if the plot really made a lot of sense but I enjoyed the ride.

In Catch-1782, the Sixth Doctor takes Mel to visit her scientist uncle, and then has to rescue her from a timewarp in which she risks being married off to one of her own ancestors. The plot is not very original, but Bonnie Langford is terrific as Mel in this – clearly Big Finish allowed her to find depths in the character that were impossible on TV.

In summary, three unexceptional but decent plays.

So, the last of the Gallifrey audios with Louise Jameson as Leela, Lalla Ward as Romana, John Leeson as K9 and Mary Tamm as Romana’s evil twin.

The first two of these five, Fractures and Warfare finish off the Pandora arc, with Romana and Leela successfully fighting back from the catacombs of Gallifrey. The final three, Appropriation, Mindbomb and Panacea all deal with the palace politics of deciding who runs the place once the internal conflict is over, and ends on an undecided note, Leela and Romana preparing to leave a devastated planet. The first two really do follow on very closely from season 2, so much so that I think the entire sequence of fifteen plays probably works better as five blocks of three rather than three blocks of five. Alan Barnes, as so often, excels in the final play which is the best of a generally decent run.

I’ve been musing on the geography of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Most of the places marked in the books are well known, and even described fairly accurately, but India appears to be an exception.

The basis of the book is a bet that the central character, Phileas Fogg, can in fact go around the world in 80 days, “now that the section between Rothal and Allahabad, on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, has been opened”/“depuis que la section entre Rothal et Allahabad a été ouverte sur le « Great-Indian peninsular railway »” (Chapter 3 – NB that the French original spells the name of the railway correctly, unlike the English translation). It turns out that this information (and therefore the basis for the bet, but that’s a different matter) is not true: the railway ends fifteen miles after Rothal at the hamlet of Kholby, as Fogg and his companions discover in Chapter 11, and the party continues on to Allahabad by elephant.

Rothal and Kholby appear to be unknown to today’s geographers. We do have some clues: “The general route of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway is as follows: Leaving Bombay, it passes through Salcette, crossing to the continent opposite Tannah, goes over the chain of the Western Ghauts, runs thence north-east as far as Burhampoor, skirts the nearly independent territory of Bundelcund, ascends to Allahabad, turns thence eastwardly, meeting the Ganges at Benares, then departs from the river a little, and, descending south-eastward by Burdivan and the French town of Chandernagor, has its terminus at Calcutta.”/“Voici, en somme, le tracé à grands points du « Great Indian peninsular railway ». En quittant l’île de Bombay, il traverse Salcette, saute sur le continent en face de Tannah, franchit la chaîne des Ghâtes-Occidentales, court au nord-est jusqu’à Burhampour, sillonne le territoire à peu près indépendant du Bundelkund, s’élève jusqu’à Allahabad, s’infléchit vers l’est, rencontre le Gange à Bénarès, s’en écarte légèrement, et, redescendant au sud-est par Burdivan et la ville française de Chandernagor, il fait tête de ligne à Calcutta.”

This itinerary isn’t difficult to trace today, apart from the bit traversed by elephant where the railway runs out because it does not cross the Vindhia Mountains. For the next two chapters the place names don’t appear to correspond to anything I can find: we have “the village of Kallenger, on the Cani, one of the branches of the Ganges…. Allahabad was now only twelve miles to the north-east.”/“la bourgade de Kallenger, située sur le Cani, un des sous-affluents du Gange… La station d’Allahabad n’était pas à douze milles dans le nord-est.” But I can’t even find the Cani, let alone the village of Kallenger (there is a Ken River, but it is just a bit too far to the west). Fogg rescues Aouda, the young widow of one of the rajahs of Bundelcund, from death by suttee, at the “pagoda of Pillaji”, which again seems to be fictional.

Of course, Verne is writing a work of fiction, and on top of that the main purpose of this passage is to set up India as a contrast with America later in the book rather than to be a geography textbook. I can’t shed any further light on Kallenger or the pagoda of Pillaji (though I do find Pillaji as a Marathan leader, but again this is too far to the west). However I think I have identified Verne’s source for Kholby: I reckon it is his misreading of the town of Kothi, which is 80 miles as the crow flies (rather than 50 miles as in the text) from Allahabad, and twelve miles (rather than fifteen) north of the railway station at Satna (which therefore may be the basis of Rothal, though how you get from the one to the other orthographically I don’t know). It’s far from perfect; Kothi isn’t actually on the railway line, which passes some way to the east of it. But I imagine that Verne was not striving for total accuracy. (Bill Butcher has more on this.)

Map of the area from 1893:

24) Fables [1]: Legends in Exile, by Bill Willingham et al.

An impulse purchase in our local comics shop last weekend. But actually rather a neat story of characters from fairy tales living in contemporary Manhattan: Snow White and the Big Bad Wolf investigate the apparent murder of Rose Red, but it is a dark, very adult tale. New York is a bit fictional anyway, so to combine it with the exiles from the Land of Fable seems almost obvious once it has been done. I’ll be looking out for the rest of this series.

23) Trillion Year Spree, by Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove

This has been looking at me from my bookshelves for the last couple of years, and I’ve finally got around to reading it. I’m a bit irritated that the cover of my paperback House of Stratus edition seems to have deteriorated rather badly in the meantime; has anyone else had this problem? Or have I just been lugging it around on my foreign trips too much?

It is a big big book about the history of science fiction from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to 1986 (with a very brief postscript for the 2001 edition). I was surprised how much of the argument of the book was already familiar to me. I guess I must have internalised it from poring over the writings of John Clute. Still, Aldiss makes some very interesting points to fill out the basic lines about Shelley, Gernsback and what happened in between.

One really striking omission is the influence of broadcast sf – cinema does get a look in, as an essential part of the cultural background as Aldiss and Wingrove see it, but Star Trek and Doctor Who are barely mentioned, and Douglas Adams’ name comes up precisely twice – first as making lots of money from Robert Sheckley’s ideas, second as just making lots of money. (Indeed, the whole second last chapter is basically about how Heinlein, Asimov, Herbert, Hubbard and van Vogt were getting money for old rope in the most recent period, though there are kinder words for Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl.)

I’m sure there are gaps but I’m bad at spotting them; Aldiss berates himself in his afterword for completely missing Terry Pratchett in his survey of more recent sf, and there will of course be others. It’s also interesting that I simply haven’t heard of several of the writers described as up-and-coming in the 1970s and 1980s. More for my reading list, I guess. Anyway, it’s a very interesting read.

On a totally irrelevant note: I have copied all my various write-ups of books and Big Finish CDs to my LibraryThing catalogue, and this will be the thousandth review I have posted there. I’m still way behind the likes of , but it’s a milestone of sorts.

Best Doctor Who post evar. I had to read it twice before I completely got it, and it obviously sailed over the heads of a lot of the commenters.

For the three of you who care and haven’t seen it: Match It for Pratchett. (Concept from , catchy slogan from .)

‘s sartorial dilemma.

has some interesting reflections on the latest LiveJournal kerfuffle. Likewise . (Do you two know each other, by the way?)

If any of you know or are interested in Jonathan Fryer, likely to be Lib Dem MEP for London from summer of next year, I’ve syndicated his blog to .

My boss on Samantha Power on Sergio Vieira de Mello (and even if you don’t recognise either of those names or know who I work for I think you’ll find it an interesting read).

Speaking of Samantha Power, I feel very sympathetic to her recent travails; I once had a narrow escape myself in that regard (fortunately the person who I described as “infuriating friends, colleagues and allies” thought it was funny rather than offensive).

22) Doctor Who and An Unearthly Child, by Terrance Dicks

Why yes, I am planning to (re-)read all the Doctor Who novelisations. They are mostly such a quick read that they just about fill a leg of my daily commute.

This is the novel version of the very first Doctor Who story, as broadcast in 1963. But the novel was not published until shortly before the story was shown again as part of the 1981 repeat season of the Five Faces of Doctor Who, so it ties much more into the continuity of the publication of dozens of Target novelisations of Who stories by the early 80s than into the TV programme’s internal chronology starting on 23 November 1963. In fact, we already had a hard-copy version of the origins of Who in the form of David Whitaker’s Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks, so Dicks was in the peculiar position of writing the story over again, of making the weirdness and newness of the 1963 story both accessible and intriguing to the 1981 fan.

Anyway, he largely succeeds. We have a bit more background to fill out both the first quarter of the book, set in a contemporary London school, and the rest, set in a stone age environment; indeed, Dicks fills out both settings perfectly satisfactorily. If you are looking for a good entry point to the Doctor Who novelisations, this is entirely characteristic and appropriate. (Fans of Barbara will rightly assert that their heroine comes over rather girly, but this is a common Terrance Dicks problem with assertive female characters.)

Of course, the story’s main importance is as a gateway for things to come, and Dicks does really well in his last couple of paragraphs, when the travellers have once again landed on an unfamiliar planet:

The Doctor was about to meet the creatures who were destined to become his greatest enemies.

Out there on Skaro, the Daleks were waiting for him.

That, if nothing else, would make you want to read the next books in the sequence.

21) Time and Relative, by Kim Newman

This was the first of the run of Doctor Who novellas published by Telos, set immediately before the events of the first TV series, in London in early 1963. It’s written in diary form, with Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, as the narrator. She and her grandfather are exiles from their home planet, and can’t quite remember why; as she tries to fit in at school, she comes top in Maths and Science, but loses out in Geography as she can’t remember what the various cities and countries are called this century.

As typical with Telos there is an irritatingly self-congratulatory blurb (this time by Justin Richards) detailing just how wonderful this particular novella is. However, in this case it is close to being justified. For one thing, Newman gives Susan her own voice – in the series, she was rather the archetype of the screaming girl companion, to the dismay of Carole Anne Ford who had taken the role believing that she would have alien kung-fu type skills and whose favourite memory is when she turned violent in The Edge of Destruction. Newman’s Susan isn’t Buffy – apart from lacking physical fighting skills, she is less lucky in her choice of friends – but she is her own person, plaing not just at being grownup like her friends but also at being human – and it all makes sense.

Newman’s other success is that his First Doctor comes closer than any other written version I have seen to capturing the essence of Hartnell’s performance. This is helped by the first-person narrative from Susan’s point of view: her grandfather is familiar but not central for most of the story. He catches the alienness of the Doctor’s motivation and manner very well.

The actual story hardly matters in all of this, but the plot of a monster based on Cold, awakened by drilling experiments and taking over the earth starting with London, is true to many a Who story and also to the horror tradition which Newman is rooted in, so he does it pretty confidently. There are of course pleasing nods to continuity: Ian and Barbara are glimpsed on a date at the cinema, there is a hint that Susan’s own people may be sending a man with a beard after her and her grandfather, and more subtly her friends at school are John and Gillian (probably most Telos readers are sufficiently up in obscure Who lore to get that particular in-joke).

Anyway, based on this, one would be encouraged to get the rest of the series of Telos novellas. Unfortunately, I have read two of the others and they don’t come up to the same mark (one of them is definitely the worst Who fiction I have read in hard copy). Still, it was a good start.

20) The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might, by Nancy Soderberg

Nancy Soderberg was a senior official in President Clinton’s national security council (with a similar role to the fictional Kate Harper in the West Wing, but a political appointee rather than a representative of the military) and then deputy US ambassador to the United Nations. She was then a colleague of mine for several years; I looked over a couple of draft chapters in this book for her and she has been kind enough to thank me in the introduction.

It is a combination of autobiographical memoir and analytical reflection on the differences between the Clinton and Bush administration approaches to foreign policy. She is admirably frank about the early mistakes made by the Clinton White House, a combination of inexperience (after being out of government for twelve years) and a failure to grasp the ways in which the world had changed. She is rightly excoriating about the delusions of superpowerdom which have fuelled the Bush White House’s bullying posture, and gives several case studies (most obviously Iraq, but also North Korea) detailing the mistakes made in both strategy and tactics. Although the book came out at the start of Bush’s second term, very little in it would need to be changed in the light of events in the last three years.

For me the most interesting insights are into the dynamics of the Washington foreign policy establishment. That the Pentagon were in general opposed to actually deploying troops I already knew; the role of the State Department as a dead hand delaying policy innovation was new to me. Having said that, the role of key personalities with their own individual styles and agendas remains paramount.

Her chapters on terrorism are surprisingly good – surprisingly because a relatively large amount of the material is recycled from other sources (Dick Clarke and the 9/11 report), the key events having happened only after she had left government; but she manages the synthesis with her own earlier experience of institutional working habits very well.

It doesn’t always work – for instance, the section on engaging the Arab world in the last chapter is rather weak, though probably right – but it’s a fairly digestible and well-informed read of a pretty heavy topic.

Andrew Tanenbaum, over at the excellent electoral-vote.com, has taken the same data I looked at here and made some nice graphic presentations of it. (hat-tip to John Scalzi.)

19) The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Person In The World, by A.J. Jacobs

I have no idea who recommended this to me or why – possibly one of the robots from Amazon or LibraryThing – but it was a good call. This is a great book, ostensibly about Jacobs’ resolution to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from beginning to end, but in fact with a lot of reflection on what it means to be clever, on his own (mostly good-humoured) rivalry with his father, on his shifting of his work-life balance (he and his wife are trying to have a baby). Basically it is the narrative of someone who suspects (with some reason) that he and his career are superficial and shallow, and he reads the entire Britannica to try and inject some depth. And by the end of the book, he appears indeed to have acquired some depth, but from other sources. It also has some very funny moments.

As promised, Quarsan dropped round to my office today to borrow Mirrorshades. Oddly enough, the subject of his girlfriend’s blog came up in conversation with my assistant, who googled it up immediately. I hadn’t realised, but the cover of Z’s book has a charming cartoon of a nude Quarsan in bed. Most entertaining.

Have seen a couple of other people do this, linking to the relevant WikiPedia entries.

1. Finaghy, Belfast
2. Stoneham, Massachusetts
3. Wassenaar, Netherlands
4. Loughbrickland, Co Down
5. Raunds, Northamptonshire
6. Armagh, Co Armagh
7. Leingarten, Baden-Württemberg
8. Clare College, Cambridge
9. The so-called Queen’s Quarter, Belfast
10. Jordanstown, Co Antrim
11. Serpentine Parade, off Whitewell Rd, Belfast
12. Banja Luka, Bosnia
13. Zagreb, Croatia
14. Sint-Genesius-Rode, Belgium
15. Oud-Heverlee, Belgium

18) Transmetropolitan: Tales of Human Waste, by Warren Ellis

I got this because I had picked up recommendations for Ellis’ Transmetropolitan series from various sources, and this fairly slim volume was numbered #0 in the shop, so I guessed it might be important introductory or prefatory material. Well, if it is, I’m not sure I can be bothered to follow up with the rest of the series. The book starts with a short story about how much protagonist Spider Jerusalem hates Christmas and other people, and it’s then a series of several dozen single-shot images by different leading comics artists, each ostensibly illustrating a different instalment of Jerusalem’s misanthropic newspaper column. Some of the illustrations, as you would hope, are indeed striking, but the combined effort is neither thought-provoking nor funny, and I began wondering pretty soon why I was supposed to care about this unpleasant character or his unpleasant opinions. Perhaps if I’d read the rest of Transmetropolitan I’d know the answer, but based on this I am not going to rush to do so.

…but it was one of several things that didn’t happen due to the wi-fi card in my lap-top giving up the ghost.

I’m not sure who it was that linked to this (possibly one of our mutual friends in a locked entry) but ‘s deconstruction of The Secret Seven by Enid Blyton is a work of genius.

17) Berlitz Turkish Travel Pack

I haven’t really finished this, but I gave it enough of a try during last week’s trip to northern Nicosia via Istanbul to justify writing it up. It’s a combination of the standard Berlitz tourist phrase book with a CD of sample important phrases. To be honest it’s not really worth paying the extra for the CD; it’s not sufficiently well integrated with the phrase book to be really useful, and the phrases are often too long and spoken too rapidly to repeat easily. But I bought it before I had discovered BYKI.com, which is what I shall use to get my ear in next time. The phrase book is fine, and it’s not their fault that I forgot it the one evening I found myself eating on my own at a restaurant where none of the staff spoke English.

16) The Owl Service, by Alan Garner

I think I read almost all of Alan Garner’s works as a teenager, but gave up on this one part way in because it didn’t grab me at the time. Well, age brings increased ability to appreciate. It’s an incredible book, a masterpiece of showing rather than telling, about patterns from the past (of story, of earthenware, of painting) coming to haunt the present day. There is a lot left beneath the surface – we never find out exactly how old Alison, Roger and Gwyn are, though the implication is that they are all three in their mid-teens, Alison perhaps younger than the other two; we never even see Alison’s mother Margaret, though she remains a presence in the background; the mystery behind the owls and flowers and the pierced stone is never completely explained, which normally would annoy me, but just seems to work really well here. A really good book.

92

Well, after my disappointment with Again, Dangerous Visions, I’m glad that at least one classic sf anthology I’ve read this year has lived up to its reputation. I’m not a wild-eyed enthusiast for cyberpunk (and William Gibson’s story here, “The Gernsback Continuum”, which rather lacks an ending, reminded me why not) but I’m always ready to be convinced by a good story, and there are loads of them in here. I think the only one I’d read before was Sterling and Gibson’s “Red Star, Winter Orbit” which is actually rather moving and nostalgic, qualities one doesn’t really associate with cyberpunk (though perhaps it qualifies because of the note of libertarian triumphalism on which it ends). I was particularly gripped by James Patrick Kelly’s “Solstice”, which mixes Stonehenge with sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, and father-daughter cloning. But apart from my doubts about the first story, there isn’t a dud in the book.

13) The River of Lost Footsteps, by Thant Myint-U
14) Freedom from Fear, and other writings, by Aung San Suu Kyi

A fascinating couple of books about the tragedy of Burma. Thant Myint-U sees the fundamental problems of the country as rooted in the disintegration of the structures of government immediately after the British conquest in 1885; from then on, the Burmese faced extraordinary hurdles in getting things together. The history of foreign involvement goes way back, of course, with for instance the Portuguese playing a very prominent role from much earlier than I had realised. But Myint-U really gets into his stride in the 20th century, and I found his account of the lessons the Burmese learnt from the Irish revolution of 1916-22 very interesting.

The story of Aung San is fascinating – imagine if the Germans had invaded Ireland in 1916, and the IRB, having been installed as a provisional government backed by Berlin, then did a deal with London to kick the Germans out in return for recognition as the rightful government; this is more or less what the Burmese did in 1941-48 with the Japanese. Aung San’s successful navigation of his country to independence was remarkable, and reminiscent of Michael Collins in rather different circumstances. Like Collins, of course, he was killed by his own fellow-countrymen before the transition was complete, still in his early 30s.

Burma’s history since the military coup of 1962 is a grim story of oppression and poverty. Thant Myint-U mingles Burma’s recent history with his own life story, growing up a Burmese emigré in New York as the grandson of the UN Secretary-General. U Thant’s funeral was the occasion of extraordinary displays of popular resistance, and of correspondingly awful repression. The River of Lost Footsteps takes the story up to the unmourned death of the dictator Ne Win, and hopes for increased international engagement in the issue.

Aung San’s daughter comes into Myint-U’s story only at the end. The first half of Freedom From Fear begins with two lengthy pieces by her on her father and on the country as a whole, and also includes two of her essays on Burmese literature. The next quarter of the book is taken up with her political statements from the brief period when she was free to make them at the end of the 1980s, and then the last section has some personal reminiscences by her friends, including to my surprise and to the editor’s credit a mildly critical piece by Josef Silverstein. It falls however to a fellow student from her days at St Hugh’s in Oxford to make a point in writing that is obvious when you look at the cover of the book: Aung San Suu Kyi is beautiful.

And also very brave. The editor of the book, published in 1990, was her late husband, Michael Aris, who writes with love and gratitude of the sixteen or so years they had together before she answered the call of destiny that they had both always known might some day come. She will be 63 this year; her father was 32 when he was killed (and she was only two). Her harassment and imprisonment by the Burmese state has lasted almost twenty years; her sons are now in their thirties. Politics is not an especially easy life anywhere; but this is something else. Freedom From Fear ends with Suu Kyi being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. It is an international disgrace that we seem no closer to resolving the situation in 2008.