There has been a lot of Doctor Who posting here this month, and there will be more as I am way behind with reviews of the audio plays I have been listening to. Here is a little alternative content.

So, Livejournal has been sold to the Russians. I am fairly convinced by Mark Kraft’s thought on the subject, from which I have taken the title of this post (“Trust, but verify”, Ronald Reagan’s old catchphrase). I am perhaps half a degree more optimistic, for a couple of reasons. The first is that SixApart were lousy owners of LJ. The infamous nipplegate and strikethrough controversies indicated that at heart this was a company that really didn’t care about the product or its consumers. Various statistics suggest that Livejournal use has been falling off of late. Change is not necessarily a bad thing, and change was needed here. (In more SixApart news, I’ve seen two blogs using their Moveable Type interface practically immobilised by technical difficulties in the last couple of months.)

The second is that despite predictions of doom when SUP took over Livejournal’s Russian operations over a year ago, I haven’t picked up any scary stories of interference with Russian content by the service provider to the extent that SixApart felt they needed to do with some of the English content. Livejournal is a significant brand in Russia, where blogging is often referred to as ЖЖ (short for Живой журнал, the Russian for Livejournal) and many prominent political and other public figures use it; the Russian sector of Livejournal has apparently doubled in size in the last year. That’s not to say that a Kremlin-inspired crackdown on content is impossible, of course. But SUP are quoted in the Moscow Times (for what that’s worth) as saying that the new owner, Alexander Mamut, is more interested in money than politics.

The third, and perhaps the least weighty (and admittedly none of these reasons for relative optimism is terribly weighty) is that the new ownership have started well by forming a LiveJournal Advisory Board. Mark Kraft, as quoted above, fears that this will be mere window-dressing, and of course he’s right that it has no actual power. But even that appearance of listening to users was beyond SixApart, and as straws in the wind go, I think this one is blowing in the right direction.

See here.

6) Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2008

A great gift for the eight-year-old (or, cough, older) fan in your life this Christmas. Includes two comic strips by Davey Moore and a prose story by Jusrtin Richards (both featuring the Tenth Doctor and Martha), plus numerous random facts about both science and Who lore. The Krynoid from The Seeds of Doom is the one Old Who monster featured which has not appeared in New Who – will we see it make a comeback in 2008? The most interesting bit I thought was the two-page spread on the Master (though the bit on the Daleks was rather good too).

5) At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien

Generally thought of as O’Brien’s masterwork, though personally I prefer the more structured lunacy of The Third Policeman. It must be the third time at least that I’ve read it, but only the first time that I’ve tried to write down what I think it’s about.

There is a lot more sex in it than I remembered, but women are barely visible except as seen by men – there’s only one speaking human female character (plus a cow plus perhaps the Good Fairy). Oddly enough the cover of this edition is a picture of a man and a woman by Jack B. Yeats, with the two separated by the spine of the book so that they are apart rather than together as the artist intended.

One can imagine the origins of the book as being a series of fantasies told in the pub, especially the all-male Dublin pub environment of the 1930s. It’s about telling stories and the tellers of stories; it’s about confronting the epic with the demotic; it’s about the supernatural encountering the familiar; it’s about a student, a hotel full of characters and Sweeny the wanderer. It’s quite hard work to read as well.

I still like The Third Policeman more, but I can see why people get obsessed with At Swim-Two-Birds.

I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else.

Up early to get to a breakfast meeting in Brussels, and it is clear enough to see no less than three bright planets – Mars in the west, glowing bright red at the feet of Gemini; Jupiter Saturn to the south, grazing Leo’s belly; and Venus emerging in the morning twilight, perhaps in Virgo, can’t be entirely sure from here. There are compensations for an early start.

The show is called “are you smarter than a 5th-grader”. Apparently in the course of the show our hero, Kellie Pickler, “was unsure whether or not a roadrunner was a bird, hoped that a foreign language might be English, stated she felt “really smart right now” after identifying that “watermelon” contains two E’s, said that a piccolo was a percussion instrument, stated that she thought Europe was a country but France was not, and decided that Franklin Pierce was a US president because her ears were pierced.”

Reminds me a bit of this.

An old article but a good one on the expat life here. (Actually the Guardian’s pieces on Brussels generally are worth exploring.) I don’t think I’ve met the author of the first piece but he has interviewed me by phone.

3) Back in Time: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Doctor Who, by Steve Couch, Tony Watkins and Peter S. Williams

Another of the books about the programme rushed out in 2005, this looks at Doctor Who from a Christian perspective and finds it illustrative of all kinds of things of interest to the authors. A good illustration of how what you get from art depends critically on what you bring to it, but I didn’t find it terribly exciting or insightful.

Just sent out an email with tracked changes still visible – AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH

and it was the second time in two weeks as well.

2) Who’s Next: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, by Mark Clapham, Eddie Robson and Jim Smith

Published by Virgin in 2005 just before New Who started. Includes very brief summaries and extended critiques of all the classic series, plus the two Pertwee audios, Slipback, the BBC webcasts, and the Children in Need specials. (Why no Pescatons?) Rates Peter Davison much higher than Tom Baker, and fiercely critical of some of the most popular Hinchcliffe/Holmes stories. It’s a while since I last looked at Clapham’s Pocket Essentials: Doctor Who which is much shorter but it seemed to have much the same material. [See ‘s correction.] The authors acknowledge Cornell, Day and Topping’s Discontinuity Guide which seems eminently fair, as it’s much the better book.

Must brush up on my Scottish monarchs!

First of all, I agree with everyone who says these have been excellent. The average quality of each of the five stories has been at least on a par with New Who, taken as a whole. I felt that the weakest story was the first, Revenge of the Slitheen, with the strongest probably the fourth, Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane (both, as it happens, written by Gareth Roberts). But all were well worth watching, especially in the company of an excited eight-year-old who had already seen them and was bursting to tell me what happened next. (“Do you know who he REALLY is, Dad?” “NO, and I DON’T WANT TO!”)

I rate Revenge of the Slitheen as the weakest of the five stories because it had essentially the same plot as School Reunion. Apart from that, I thought it did the job OK, re-introducing the main cast (and introducing Clyde as substitute for Kelsey from Invasion of the Bane, who to be honest was a bit full of herself).

Eye of the Gorgon, on the other hand, was really very good – the presence of Phyllida Law, the sinister nuns, the comedy element of distracting Alan, and yet the very scary bits of Alan being turned to stone and Sarah Jane herself nearly going the same way, as well as the very serious sub-theme of dealing with Alzheimer’s. Only the rather “with a bound, Maria’s mirror set them free” ending keeps this from the top spot in my list.

I saw the second episode of Warriors of Kudlak first, and wasn’t overwhelmed. The first episode is actually much better, with smart nods to Ender’s Game, various other sf classics, and most spectacularly Kate Bush’s “Cloudbursting” (see author’s note). But as with Eye of the Gorgon, I felt the ending was a bit rushed, and I regret that we won’t see more of Nadiyah Davis as Jen.

Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane is, frankly, Hugo-worthy. As their loved ones are torn away from them, Maria and Alan successively have their world fall apart, and Jane Asher (who previously played the Doctor’s grandduaghter in the radio play “Whatever happened to Susan”) is superb as Sarah Jane’s alter ego Andrea. (F asked me, “So does that mean that Andrea had all those adventures with the Doctor instead?” I suppose so – fan-fic writers, get to it!) A really brilliant fifty minutes of television, the only puzzling thing for me being the role of the Graske. Not surprised to see that Graeme Harper directed it.

The Lost Boy was also pretty good, though it critically depended on Thomas Knight as Luke, who is the weakest of the core cast and only just about carries it off (his nemesis, played by Ryan Watson, bears a startling resemblance to my nine-year-old nephew), and is rather similar in some ways to its immediate predecessor (playing with the core characters’ identities, cosmic disaster). Of all of the stories, it was the one which veered closest to the worst excesses of New Who, with the moon crashing into the earth, return of old enemies at the end of part 1 (though I admit I didn’t see it coming) and of an old friend at the end of part 2 (though I admit I didn’t see that coming either).

So, in summary, this was generally excellent television. The fact that the format allowed for cliff-hangers every second week certainly made a difference. Elisabeth Sladen is still brilliant as Sarah, and Yasmin Paige as her main sidekick Maria is also excellent. Of the supporting male cast, Daniel Anthony (Clyde) and Joseph Millson (Alan, Maria’s father) are also well up to it, though as noted above Thomas Knight (Luke) is still maturing. (And I see that Juliet Cowan, who plays Maria’s mother Chrissie, was in This Life playing a character called Nicki – can anyone remind me which one that was?) I hope there will be more.

Now that we are in December, we will all start doing review-of-the-year posts, and as is traditional, I will start with the first post of each month in 2007.

January: Locked post on family situation and my successful job-hunt, followed by unlocked post reviewing a Doctor Who book.
February: Link to my negative review of Robert A Heinlein’s last book.
March: Preview of the Northern Ireland Assembly elections.
April: Links to other people’s thoughts on the previous night’s Doctor Who episode.
May: My son’s drawing of Doctor Who.
June: Where to find me on various social networks.
July: My review of the previous night’s Doctor Who episode.
August: My review of a 1971 Doctor Who story.
September: How nerdy am I?
October: I complain when I appear to have bought the wrong Doctor Who book.
November: Greetings to those I saw at the First Thursday sf meeting in London the previous evening.
December: Reviews of five classic Doctor Who stories.

Hmm, there is a bit of a recurring theme there, isn’t there? Compare with the equivalent post from last year, which cited three book reviews, three posts on international politics, two on my own travels, two on Doctor Who, a meme and a comment on Harlan Ellison’s behaviour at the Worldcon; or the 2005 version, which was also a lot more varied. I calculate that about 20% of this year’s entries have been tagged “doctor who“, so it’s just coincidence that so many of them have been the first ones posted in a particular month!

1) About Time: The Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who, 1980-1984, by Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood

This is the fifth and latest so far published in this superb series of reference guides to Doctor Who (see previous reviews of volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4). It’s the only one that doesn’t begin or end with a change of Doctors – it encapsulates the whole Peter Davison era, plus Tom Baker’s last season and Colin Baker’s first story; it also, of course, covers roughly the first half of John Nathan-Turner’s time as producer. It’s an era where my memory is variable – I saw every episode of seasons 18 and 19 when first broadcast, but remember only about half of season 20 and a bit less of season 21. Since I started watching old Who again in 2005, I’ve seen only five stories from this period (out of 29), so on the whole it is less fresh for me.

Still, Miles and Wood deliver the goods, explaining what the intellectual and cultural roots of each story are, usually finding good things to say despite their general anti-John Nathan-Turner snarking as well as blistering specific critiques of each one (eg, under The Twin Dilemma, they point out that there doesn’t actually appear to be a dilemma in the story). Their inserted essays are, I think, more analytical on the whole than in the other volumes, starting and finishing with the cases for the defence and prosecution of JNT, and including also reflections on the effects of Doctor Who Monthly and the 1983 Longleat celebration on Doctor Who fandom.

 thinks they miss the importance of the Renaissance in Season 18. They also mourn the fact that Graeme Harper directed only two stories – fortunately, this turns out not to be true.

I have another three Who books on my reading pile, but this series is the best I have seen so far.

I’ve been less engaged with this year’s Lib Dem leadership contest than last year’s, basically because work and real life have kept me busier; I’ve been enjoying my new job (which has meant I am posting less here generally) and our changed family situation has absorbed most of the rest of my energies.

But the ballot papers have arrived, and it is a straight choice between Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne. It is a much more difficult choice than last year. We all know that the problem with Lib Dems is that some of them are mad, some of them are boring, and some are both; last year, it was easy enough to rule out voting for Simon Hughes on the first of these grounds and Menȝies Campbell on the second. But neither Clegg nor Huhne is either mad or boring, so that filter is no use to me.

Both, frankly, would be acceptable leaders for me. Clegg was an exact contemporary of mine as an undergraduate at Cambridge, at a college next door to mine; I don’t remember him, though he remembers me due to my visibility in student politics. Both became MEPs the year we moved to Belgium, 1999, and I ran into both of them from time to time at party events; I remember on one such occasion a party aide glancing at Clegg and Huhne chatting on the other side of the room, and muttering to me that between the two of them they had the vast majority of the aggregate political talent of the Lib Dem MEPs, which seems to me monstrously unfair to the others (but I will come back to that point later). Their policy offerings are pretty similar. There is one issue, Trident, where my own feelings lie closer to Huhne’s line than to Clegg’s, but it’s not in itself a decisive issue for me (and as someone pointed out, it is anyway the party conference that decides policy rather than the leader).

In the end, I’m making my decision based on what other people think. Nick Clegg’s support group on Facebook has 845 members, of whom only six are on my friends list; Huhne’s is smaller in total (567) but 13 are on my friends list. Both campaign websites list people whose opinions I respect. Huhne has, for instance, my old Cambridge contacts David Howarth (now MP) and Andrew Duff (now MEP) not to speak of and David Steel. Clegg’s list is also formidable, including Paddy Ashdown, Shirley Williams, , about half of the MPs and more than half of the MEPs.

It’s that very last point that decides it for me. In the end, all we can judge from the campaign is how good the candidates are at running leadership campaigns. The one thing that became clear to me during the collapse of Charles Kennedy’s leadership was that those working most closely with the party leader – those who are, in fact, looking to be led on a daily basis – are the ones best placed to judge whether he or she is doing a good job. They may get it wrong – the parliamentary party backed Beith over Ashdown, if I remember correctly, in 1988. But where the stakes are otherwise equal, I’ll listen to the views of those who are more on the inside than me.

The killer statistic is this: of the ten Lib Dems elected to the European Parliament in 1999, all but Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne are still MEPs. The other eight, who worked alongside them in the parliament for the full five-year term of 1999-2004, have declared their voting intentions as follows:
Backing Huhne: Andrew Duff, Elspeth Attwooll, Liz Lynne
Backing Clegg: Diana Wallis, Graham Watson, Emma Nicholson, Chris Davies, Sarah Ludford. (Plus also Bill Newton-Dunn, elected as a Tory in 1999 but defected to the Lib Dems in 2000.)

Despite my friend’s comment about them, I have considerable respect for the political abilities of the vast majority of the above-named. On aggregate, they are backing Clegg, and therefore so am I.

I think. But it will be a pretty close race.

here. (Hat-tip to .)

See also the same author’s guide to Belgian beers.

finds a solution when her car breaks down.

Not really the ones I would have chosen to watch during the longueurs of this week’s business trip, but they just happened to be the stories I had to hand when doing the last-minute packing.

The Sea Devils was the middle story of the 1972 season. The Third Doctor had encountered their land-based cousins, the Silurians, a couple of years before. This story is particularly memorable for two things: the glorious scene with the Master attempting to communicate with the Clangers, echoed thirty-five years on by his latest incarnation’s encounter with the Teletubbies; and it is the first point where the Third Doctor actually does “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”, which became his catchphrase. Like all of the Pertwee six-parters I have seen, it drags a bit in places, and the two elderly male stooges (the jail governor and the parliamentary private secretary who is given improbably authority to authorise a nuclear strike on the monsters) are too two-dimensional to be credible. It’s also disappointing that after his valiant efforts to make peace with the Silurians the Doctor decides to side with the stupid bureaucrats and destroy their cousins, after yet again the Master’s non-human allies turn on him – will he never learn? The scenes of dead Sea Devils floating on the water are rather sad. But Katy Manning for once is rather good as Jo, with almost sensible clothes and rescuing the Doctor a couple of tines for a change. Also a shout-out to the silently feminist naval officer. No UNIT, slightly surprisingly, but otherwise a standard Third Doctor story.

If it hadn’t been for the aforementioned hastiness of my packing, it would have been a lot longer before I got around to watching this, so bad is the reputation of the 1986 Trial of a Time Lord season among people whose opinions I generally respect (and the first four episodes totally failed to impress me). But actually “Mindwarp” was really rather good, and it’s no wonder that Colin Baker wrote a sort-of sequelRevelation of the Daleks, listened to Slipback and of course now have caught up with the whole Trial of a Time Lord; even so, I doubt if the remaining three stories will surprise me with their brilliance as this did.

Having said that, the next segment of the Trial of a Time Lord season, “Terror of the Vervoids”, is also not as bad as I expected. New companion Mel appears out of nowhere, looking remarkably like Bonnie Langford, and the head biologist on the spaceship looks remarkably like Honor Blackman. The Doctor’s grief for Peri, the style of the Agatha Christie-type murder mystery, and the sense that this is a future environment that the Doctor is familiar with, all add a certain depth to proceedings. One could forgive the fact that the plot doesn’t really make a lot of sense if it were not for the Vervoids themselves which are, alas, terrible rather terrifying; they are very nearly as awful as my personal candidate for worst Who monster of all, the giant mushroom creatures in the jungle seen in latter episodes of The Chase. On top of this the Doctor once again (as with the Sea Devils) simply wipes them all out; the Valeyard is right to ask for some kind of accountability for this act of genocide, though of course the whole courtroom scene as shown here is a pretty stupid forum in which to do so. The serried ranks of Time Lords in full regalia turning to watch the screen are particularly silly.

Sadly, there is nothing to be said in favour of the last segment of the Trial of a Time Lord, two episodes credited to three writers, a botched farrago of half-baked Time Lord lore, where we find out that the Valeyard is a projection of the Doctor’s future self, and he and the Master take it in turns to do the evil cackle. The Time Lords have forgotten who the Master is, despite what happened in The Deadly Assassin and their summoning of his aid in The Five Doctors. The means available to the Master and the Valeyard are conveniently immense and yet just not quite immense enough to destroy the Doctor. I am even a bit dubious about Peri’s survival, which rather critically undermines the drama of her death (and the chemistry between her and King Yrcanos was as absent as that between Leela and Andred – at least Susan, Vicki and Jo got decent parting romances.) It’s a shame that after delivering so many classics Robert Holmes’ final contribution is such a dud, adn the Sixth Doctor, having won his trial, then gets regenerated anyway. The miracle is that the show was allowed another three years after this awful closure to an over-ambitious season.

The Happiness Patrol, from the dying days of 1988, is a fairly standard rebels against the system story, lifted by some fairly memorable characters and concepts – especially Sheila Hancock as the dictator, and her vicious pet Fifi. It comes close to looking convincing – the coherent style of the Happiness Patrol themselves is almost genius. I started off being quite impressed by how well the Candyman worked, but I had completely gone off him in the end, and the musician and the census official, while nice touches, didn’t quite seem to integrate into the whole thing. Not awful, but definitely not one of the great ones either.

So in summary, “Mindwarp” was an unexpected pleasure, The Sea Devils, “Terror of the Vervoids” and The Happiness Patrol all had their strengths and weaknesses, and “The Ultimate Foe” is best forgotten.

If x is an approximation to the square root of n, then (x/2 + n/2x) is a closer approximation.

I’ve driven this route many times, and I’ve always been aware that Macedonia is in general a few degrees warmer than Kosovo – farther south, less elevated, gets the tail end of the warmer Mediterranean breezes before they are deflected by the mountains. But this is the first time I can remember doing the route when the temperature difference straddled freezing point: it was a tremendous contrast to emerge from the Vardar gorge after crossing the border to find the ground covered in snow, and bedraggled bushes covered with frost like last year’s decorations. Macedonia, twenty minutes drive behind me, was a bit chilly, but there was no visible evidence of winter weather having hit. It’s quite rare for international frontiers to actually coincide with such a dramatic change in the micro-climate.

11) The Happy Prince and Other Stories, by Oscar Wilde

Have had this ebook from FictionWise sitting on my Blackberry for ages, but airport / waiting for meetings to happen gave me the incentive to go through it. I was familiar with two of the stories, The Happy Prince and The Selfish Giant, from children’s anthologies, but the others (The Nightingale And The Rose, The Devoted Friend and The Remarkable Rocket) were all new to me.

I’m not actually certain that I would give these stories to a child to read – they are all so very sad. The one with the happiest ending is The Selfish Giant, and even then he dies, if not quite as tragically as the protagonists of the other stories! Knowing what I do about Wilde’s own life and death, I was on the lookout for reflections in the stories: but in fact what there is is rather surprising – The Selfish Giant is an explicitly Christian allegory, and The Remarkable Rocket, full of his own pretension, arrogance and snobbery, eventually terminally expends his considerable talents and energies in such a way that nobody notices.

These are uncomfortable stories, and should only be read by children (and perhaps even adults) under strict supervision.

There have been times in my life that the Holiday Inn in Skopje has felt like a second home. I’ve been here rather less in the last year or so, since the people I knew well in the previous government carelessly lost the election and since I changed jobs myself. But it’s quite nice to be back, benefiting from wi-fi, essentially doing much the same work as I would be doing in my office in Brussels. The one irritant is that my Belgian mobile phone doesn’t seem to be networked. But as long as the most urgent messages are getting through I can cope. (My long-suffering assistant in Brussels has already backstopped a couple for me.)

This trip has been unusually chaotic to organise. I had originally planned to be in Kosovo today and see government officials here tomorrow afternoon. Then I realised that the people I want to see in Kosovo are all in Austria today, returning only late this evening. So I asked the Macedonian officials to rearrange their meeting for today instead. Most of them can do it, but of course the most important official is in Estonia and gets back too late this evening to meet. So I have lined up a separate meeting with her tomorrow morning, though am still seeing her colleagues this afternoon; and then will try and zoom up to Kosovo, weather and traffic conditions permitting, to pack in a day’s worth of meetings into the afternoon and evening. And will then try and zoom back here late tomorrow evening to sleep, as my plane home to Brussels via Zagreb on Friday morning is at a truly ungodly hour.

Normally I prefer to travel with colleagues, but I think the levels of uncertainty about the timetabling and transport make it just as well that I am alone this time!

Those of you who care have been expressing outrage or satisfaction, depending, about the big news re next year’s Doctor Who.

Come on folks, it’s not a big deal. It’s rather nice that the programme is able to explore both its recent roots (as with this story) and its more distant roots (as with School Reunion and Time Crash). I can’t quite believe that some commentators seem to think this means The End Of Doctor Who As We Know It – that happened in 1966 when William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton!

In other news, I am baffled as to why my attempts to list my newly purchased copy of Spectrum IV, edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest, breaks my LibraryThing catalogue. I’m sure there is a good reason.

(By the way, I am in Macedonia for the rest of the week.)

I was in and out of Beneluxcon this weekend, given that it was just up the road in the Novotel in Leuven and featured three particularly interesting authors, Ken MacLeod, Christopher Priest and Alastair Reynolds. There were 100 people signed up (I myself was alphabetically last at #100) but I didn’t see more than 40 there at any given time. I was struck by a couple of features of the event which differed from any other sf con I have attended (not that I have been to all that many).

1) The programming was fairly light: both mornings and afternoons featured an hour-long session with a single GoH (MacLeod in the mornings, Priest in the afternoons) followed by another panel featuring more of the guests (apart from the three already mentioned, these included two Dublin writers, David Murphy and Robert Nielsen, and three Dutch/Flemish writers) to pick up on the themes of the first panel. So that was only four hours of actual discussion on each day, though there were also readings, signings, a workshop, a banquet, and a tour of Leuven, none of which I was able to attend.

I felt that this approach probably did ensure that the discussion panels were of higher quality than I have sometimes experienced elsewhere; there was no sense of “OMG I’m on another panel WTF am I going to say” which I have sometimes seen (indeed, sometimes experienced directly) at other cons. It was, of course, embedded in a wider theme of talking about “Visions of the Future”, which the con chair attempted with varying success to channel discussions into. And it happened to suit my own intermittent attendance rather well.

2) The second point that struck me is rather less to Beneluxcon’s favour. The eight featured guest authors and the four-strong organising committee were all male. Not a single woman appeared on a panel at any time during the weekend. Unless I missed something, the only woman mentioned in the programme booklet was a local fan who had recently died. Very peculiar. There were certainly women in attendance – I had long chats with Agnes (and Graham) Andrews, and more briefly with ex- – but I felt a palpable gap in discussing the future of humanity, as only half of it was represented at the top table.

Anyway, I did generally enjoy it. Ken MacLeod’s talk on the future of ideology was as provocative as I had hoped, and indeed I would have felt the con was worth the attendance for that alone. Christopher Priest on the inside story of The Prestige was also an entertaining insight into the processes of writing and then having one’s work transferred to the big screen. I did very well in the dealer’s room, picking up nine vintage paperbacks for €15, including Mutiny in Space. And I note that the organising committee for next year’s Beneluxcon in Eindhoven includes someone I knew twenty years ago, so I’m open to attending it, if the guests are interesting and the everything is right.

10) Mutiny In Space, by Avram Davidson

I confess that I bought this purely because I overheard people sniggering about how Jack Gaughan, the cover artist, had been told to add a very small amount to the costume of the lady on the front cover compared to the original (which is still visible, if more dimly, on the back cover):

Also the blurb made this look like it was probably entertainingly bad, particularly given its likely take on sexual politics.

Well, it turned out to be a bad book for quite different reasons. The blurb writer obviously felt that a planet controlled by women must be a Bad Thing; but in the novel Davidson portrays it as a pre-industrial feudal Eden, where men happen to be much shorter and women do the chivalry thing. (The scenes described in the blurb have almost no resemblance to anything that happens in the book.) If anything, I was disappointed by how unimaginative the setting actually was, and the plot is just good Earthmen vs bad Earthmen in Eden. On top of that the characterisation is lousy, and the pacing rather peculiar.

A quick read, though not necessarily a particularly edifying one.

Three blogs that you all should be reading:

plasters the ceiling.

Alex Wilcock is torn between the two Lib Dem leadership candidates.

President Ahmedinejad of Iran.

Like many other people, I’m sorry to hear of the death of Verity Lambert yesterday, the day before the 44th anniversary of Doctor Who and the week before her own 72nd birthday. Not many people start a cult TV series before they turn 28. Her professional record was indeed impressive, but I found myself really charmed by her commentaries on the DVDs of early Doctor Who stories, and by a lovely double-headed interview she did with Russell T Davies in one of last year’s Doctor Who magazines. Her legacy, of course, lives on.