23) George and Sam, by Charlotte Moore

This is a brilliant book about living with autism in your family. I found myself experiencing painful shocks of recognition every few pages, from the experience of the more “neurotypical” sibling, to the necessity of keeping important things (such as sugar and toothpaste) locked up, to the unintentional unkindnesses of friends and relatives. Our two girls are very different from Moore’s two boys, and all four are of course very different from each other – neither of ours can talk, while both of hers can; she has had more success with toilet training than we have; her boys apparently get along well with each other, while our four-year-old U is somewhat frightened of her ten-year-old sister B (who normally blithely ignores U, but has occasionally pulled her hair). Also, of course, she has managed to keep both of hers at home so far, whereas we are now expecting B to move out to full-time residential care in the next couple of months. Another extremely important difference is that my wife and I are still together. (Incidentally, I also realized that I know Moore’s father through liberal politics.) There are many good lines in the book, but I’ll just take this one from near the end as a good summary of the common ground I found with her:

These mysterious, impossible, enchanting beings will always be among us, unwitting yardsticks for our own moral behaviour, uncomprehending challengers of our definition of what it means to be human.

You couldn’t take this book as an essential medical text on autism. (For instance, Moore writes about experiments with diet as a way of improving her children’s condition, but her account should be taken as a personal history rather than a recommendation; we’ve tried that and it made no difference apart from making B grumpy because there was no cheese.) Nick Hornby in his introduction makes parallels with Wild Swans and Claire Tomalin’s life of Pepys, but I think that’s a mistake: both of those are deeply factual books which we should take as serious academic contributions to the histories of China and of seventeenth-century England.  I think a better parallel is with Rebecca West’s amazing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is misleading and possibly even dangerous if taken as a factual history of Yugoslavia, but if read correctly as a human response to the experience of the Balkans is one of the great books of the twentieth century. Anyway, this is a great account of an important part of my world by someone who shares it.

19) Doctor Who – the Caves of Androzani, by Terrance Dicks
20) Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin, by Terrance Dicks
21) Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, by Terrance Dicks
22) Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive, by David Fisher

Four Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories from the original series here. The first two are average Terrance Dicks treatments of two of Robert Holmes’ best scripts, The Deadly Assassin being regarded by many as the Fourth Doctor’s greatest story, and The Caves of Androzani regarded by almost everyone as the Fifth Doctor’s best moment.

But with Doctor Who and the Planet of the Spiders, Dicks has taken a Third Doctor TV story which by all accounts (I haven’t seen it) was decidedly average and turned it into a cracking good read. It was one of the first of his many many Doctor Who books (and he’s still at it), and for those of us (like me) who occasionally mock the by-the-numbers approach of his later efforts, it’s very much worth re-reading the earlier ones to remind ourselves of how good he was at turning dodgy special effects and occasionally wooden acting into a novel that caught the spirit of what he, as script editor, had no doubt hoped and intended the original TV version to be. (Like The Caves of Androzani, Planet of the Spiders has the Doctor regenerating after an adventure climbing around in caves. But I think that’s a coincidence.)

David Fisher wrote two Doctor Who novels based on his own scripts for the Fourth Doctor stories Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive. (He also wrote the original scripts for two Fourth Doctor Key to Time stories, The Stones of Blood and the Androids of Tara, but the novelisations of those were done by – of course – Terrance Dicks.) I remember really enjoying his Doctor Who and the Creature from the Pit when it first came out, and Doctor Who and the Leisure Hive is, for the same reasons, also a hilarious read – Fisher has a Douglas Adams-like ability to build in circumstantial detail and hilarious commentary to make you feel that this is a real, zany universe in which the Doctor and Romana are dealing with complex alien societies as well as future technology. I saw the series when it was first broadcast, but missed the last episode for some reason – I see it’s now on DVD, and after reading this I am very much inclined to add that to my collection too.

18) Harpist in the Wind, by Patricia A. McKillip

Bought this a while back because it was rated (by some people) ahead of Arthur C Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise, which beat it for the 1980 Hugo Award; it also won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

I started off rather enjoying the travails of the protagonist, who has been endowed with super-powers and must save the continent, while at the same time keeping his relationship with his girlfriend on track. Unfortunately I lost patience with it about half way through; it’s the third book of a trilogy, and doesn’t really stand on its own (too much back-story needing to be explained); also I wasn’t convinced by McKillip’s world-building – very little sense of landscape or human geography. Probably my general state of fatigue didn’t help.

17) Wilt in Nowhere, by Tom Sharpe

I read the first third and cannot care enough about any of the characters to finish it: the bits set in England are tired ranting, the bits in America are unfunny stereotypes. As a teenager I read the first two Wilt books and was mildly bemused by the adult humour; in this latest book Sharpe has clearly lost his way. Wilt and his wife central characters were children during the second world war and yet themselves have pre-teen children in 2002, and they are not really timeless characters. I picked this up last year in Heathrow airport where someone had cast it aside. Now I know why they did so.

16) The Discovery of the Germ, by John Waller

About the period between 1880 and 1900 in which it became generally accepted that germs were responsible for disease. Competently done but not very exciting.

I’m startled by the frankness that some people put into their Facebook status updates. Just from my current screen:

A. is “smug and hungover.”
B. is just “hungover.”
C. is “a drunken rogue. Well, make that a hung-over rogue.”
D. is “a terrible flirt……”
E. is “in need of a hug.”
F. is “desperately procrastinating [explains about what]”

Disarming, but not sure I would want the whole world to know those things about me. If they were true. Which they aren’t. At least not many of them. At least not very often.

But you see what I mean?

My major work engagement the day before yesterday (Wednesday) was a very intense meeting with the gentleman on the left. He is in his mid-fifties, the president of an unrecognised former Ottoman territory, traditionally Muslim but very secularised, which has been historically locked in conflict with its Orthodox Christian neighbours and is currently mired in a UN-brokered peace process which appears to be going nowhere very fast.

My major work engagement yesterday (Thursday) was a very intense meeting with the gentleman on the right. He is in his mid-fifties, the president of an unrecognised former Ottoman territory, traditionally Muslim but very secularised, which has been historically locked in conflict with its Orthodox Christian neighbours and is currently mired in a UN-brokered peace process which appears to be going nowhere very fast.

I’m not too worried about getting typecast, since as far as I am aware there are no other former Ottoman territories in that position.

(No points for working out who the two gentlemen are – if you are reading this, you know what sort of work I do!)

15) The Nobel Prizes, by Burton Feldman

I bought this when I visited the Nobel Museum last year, since when my then employers came (we were told) fairly close to winning the Peace Prize, which would have brought the subject matter a bit closer to home. It’s a good book, and I wasn’t especially surprised to find that Feldman is a scholar in the history of ideas. He gives an interesting introduction, first to the life and times of Alfred Nobel himself (whose elder brothers opened up the oil industry in Baku, now the capital of Azerbaijan; Alfred invented dynamite) and then to the machinations around the establishment of the prize – which would have come to naught had the Swedish government not decided that it was a matter of state interest for the prizes to be instituted as a semi-state responsibility.

He then runs through the categories, in all of which there have been questionable awards and clear omissions. The worst offender is the Nobel Prize for Literature, which was not awarded to either Joyce or Proust, but did go to various utterly forgotten writers (sometimes for political reasons, sometimes just because they wrote long best-selling sagas) during the lifetime of both. (Feldman sees Beckett’s Nobel Prize as a compensation for missing Joyce, which I think is a bit unfair on Beckett.) I learnt more about economics from Feldman’s account of the relevant Prize (not strictly a Nobel as it was only instituted in 1969) than I have from any other single source, and raved so enthusiastically about it yesterday to a visiting friend (who is the best-known economist in his country – admittedly a rather small country) that he asked for a photocopy of the relevant chapter.

But the Physics, Chemistry and Physiology/Medicine prizes do seem on the whole to have hit the mark, despite their rampant politicisation, with the odd embarrassing miss (eg Pavlov, for an experiment that did not actually work; though his later research probably makes up for it). And the Peace Prize is clearly a mark of recognition which carries a huge amount of weight on the world political stage. Feldman’s book dates from 2000; I remember watching an interview with Jimmy Carter, shortly after he got his award in 2002, and his reply to the question of whether he had ever regretted that the Peace Prize could only be divided two ways rather than three, since that knocked him out of the running as a co-laureate with Begin and Sadat in 1978: his reply was along the lines of “oh, only about once a day, for about twenty-four hours each time.” He doesn’t, however, answer the mystery of why Nobel charged the Norwegians with the responsibility of the Peace Prize, rather than the Swedes who do all the others.

In the midst of the occasionally bizarre discourse around my review of Old Man’s War last year, one infuriated protagonist asked me rhetorically if I would have Hemingway’s Nobel for Literature revoked on the grounds of his political views. My reply at the time was that it’s up to the Nobel folks who they choose, but since they clearly make decisions on political grounds, I feel perfectly entitled to criticise their choice on political grounds. Feldman’s account makes me even more certain of that.

12) Asteroids: A History, by Curtis Peebles

Asteroids are another long-standing interest of mine. Back in my teenage years I participated in two of the International Astronomical Youth Camps, working on asteroids in Bavaria in 1984 and on meteors in Slovenia in 1985. (Excessive consumption of sljivovic meant that I saw double meteors one evening…) And some day I shall properly write up my semi-successful search for the asteroid 132 Æthra.

This is a good book, but infuriatingly a bit thin on scholarship. There isn’t a single reference to any article published in an academic history of science journal. I found this truly bizarre. More than half the references are to articles in Sky and Telescope, which is all very well, but has the academic community working on history of science completely ignored this topic? And perhaps a few references to the primary scientific literature might have been helpful?

Having said that, Peebles’ heart is clearly in the right place. There’s a whole chapter about the politics of street-lighting in San Diego, California, which is of marginal relevance to the history of asteroids but of great interest to those of us interested in the science/politics interface. There’s a chapter on the naming of asteroids, which ends with the emphatic statement that “Mr Spock is a mythological figure.” There’s lots of interesting circumstantial detail on the personalities and life experiences of those who participated in the search for asteroids.

The scientific point I was left wondering about was the hardness of the boundaries between asteroids, comets and dwarf planets. The book was published before the recent downgrading of Pluto, but it’s pretty clear that Pluto is in the same continuum of objects as Neptune’s moon Triton – they just happen to orbit different primaries – and that at the other end of the scale various asteroids are pretty comet-like and vice versa, including the case of Comet Wilson-Harrington, now reclassified as asteroid 4015 Wilson-Harrington.

Free skiffy story idea, which I shall never get around to writing up: Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 1, famous for having a relatively circular orbit (for a comet) and suffering occasional inexplicable flare-ups of brightness, is really and Alien Space base left behind by the first intelligent species to explore our system. (Yeah, I know, Gateway, etc. But I think my version is subtly different.)

13) The Megalith Builders of Western Europe, by Glyn Daniel

I’ve been fascinated by standing stones and megaliths since I was very young; the Giant’s Ring near Belfast was a favourite family outing when I was growing up, and as a teenager I combed the valleys and drumlins around Loughbrickland at weekends looking for more standing stones. My fascination has spilled over into this livejournal at times as well. However, I didn’t learn a lot from this book, published half a century ago with a 1961 update for the paperback edition explaining that the new-fangled radiocarbon dating meant all their previous chronological assumptions were definitely wrong. Daniel just lists by typology all the known megalithic tombs in different parts of Western Europe, and about the only conclusion you can draw from the book is that the borders between ancient cultures were not where the modern borders are. I would like to find something more up to date, and more interesting, on this subject.

12) Faith, by Joanna Trollope

Another very short story, published as a separate book by Bloomsbury, about forgiveness and redemption across three generations of the same family. Told in Trollope’s usual lucid prose.

10) Once in a Blue Moon, by Magnus Mills
11) Three To See the King, by Magnus Mills

I tried Mills once before, and didn’t really get him; looking back on my notes at the time, I realise that I was under the weather that day and perhaps my sense of humour was impaired. rightly called me to look more at the human condition that Mills is describing and less at the details.

I loved both of these books; perhaps I was in the right mood this time. Once in a Blue Moon is a collection of four very short stories, and Three To See the King a longer but still very short novel (167 pages). People are very strange, and by putting them in strange yet almost familiar environments Mills brings out our inherent strangeness beautifully. I could spend ages speculating about the symbolism of tin house vs. brick houses, and the sandy plain vs. the canyon, in Three To See the King, but I won’t; I’ll just strongly recommend these two books.

Yes, the interview meme is going round again. I owe a few of you questions from about a year ago; I’ve completely forgotten who you are.

The rules this time around are:

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I respond by asking you five questions so I can get to know you better.
3. You will either update your LJ with the answers to the questions or post them here.
4. If you repost you will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post; if you answer here, then any of my friends (or me) can do a set of follow up questions, but you get to ask them stuff too.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you can ask them five questions.
6. Or you can just ask me five question in comments here if you prefer.

First up, saved and renumbered from a couple of months ago:

1) What was your major in college?

Astrophysics. Well, in the Cambridge system, it was the Natural Sciences Tripos, with a Part II in Physics and Astrophysics. I then did an M Phil in the History and Philosophy of Science, culminating in research on an obscure medieval astrologer, and a Ph D in a more modern topic in the same field.

2) And how early on did you know you wanted to work in the international arena?

I think it was always a fantasy of mine; but at the same time I never felt sufficiently loyal to either the British or Irish states that I could bear to subject myself to working for their diplomatic services. (I did actually apply for both: blew the second exam for the Brits, and the interview stage for the Irish. Probably a good thing in both cases.) I have been very lucky in that I was able to find other ways of operating.

3) Also, how the hell do you read so quickly?

Speed-reading is one of the most professionally useful skills you can acquire. Seriously. Go and do a course in it.

Also the fact that I am now commuting to work by train helps.

4) Your opinions on election monitoring.

I’m in favour. This will come as no surprise. I think we have to remember that there are two very different aspects to election monitoring: 1) the flying in of international observers to provide some external seal of credibility (or the reverse) and 2) the boosting of domestic non-partisan monitoring of the electoral process. The first approach is the short-term headline news (especially if it breaks down
5) 2nd favorite TV show (If my assumptions are in the right, then Doctor Who safely occupies the throne of 1st place.)

Also has asked me the following:

1) You’ve run for office in the past, can you see yourself holding elected positions in the future?

I’d love to, but it depends a bit on a) seeking nomination, b) getting nominated and c) getting elected. At present, with our family circumstances, the first of these is the really big hurdle. Some day things may be different.

2) Ignoring nationality language and religion, if you could pick the current consitution/system of government of any existing country today to live in, which would you choose and why?

I’m actually not fussy; more or less any liberal democracy will do. We benefit massively from the health system here in Belgium, but the downside is that politics is not only parochial and clientelistic, but also desperately uninteresting; yet, having grown up where I did, I can survive without having a particularly interesting political system.

“Liberal democracy” excludes countries where the current head of state came to power by a judicial coup and where dozens of members of the lower house of parliament get in without having to face an contest due to comfortably gerrymandered electoral districts.

3) I know from previous links that you read some webcomics; which are your favourites?

Actually I read very few. I have my daily Doonesbury and Dilbert feeds; the only web-specific comic I read is Questionable Content / . I used to read Queen of Wands
4) Autism is obviously something that affects your life in a number of ways; do you think the growing awareness of more minor conditions is a good thing, or do you worry it may be a “geek fashion” thing that diminishes the impact of more serious problems?

Hah, you have made my trawl my own LibraryThing catalogue, to see whose books published in the last couple of years I have given five stars out of five.

I’m jolly impressed with Zoran Živković, Lois McMaster Bujold, and (when they are on form) Terry Pratchett and George R.R. Martin. I guess Bujold is currently out in front, partly because her latest book arrived today and we have had merry discussions (“we” being me, my wife and my mother-in-law) about who gets to read it first.

7) The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen, translated and edited by Jeffrey Frank and Diana Crone Frank

I thought this was a tremendously good presentation of the great HCA stories; some of them of course I knew from the various versions of my childhood, but all of them (Except the very short “Princess and the Pea”) have something a little more in the original. For once, the introduction was interesting and the endnotes helpful; a really good presentation from Granta.

Google Maps appears not to recognise roads in either Slovenia or Croatia – though oddly enough it does cover Bosnia.

I imagine that driving from Trieste in Italy to Bihać in Bosnia would take about three or four hours. The Google route, via Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade and Sarajevo, will take you, er, rather longer.

“Så, nu kan jeg da sove, så længe jeg gider.”

“Well, now I can sleep in as late as I like.”

(King Frederik VII of Denmark, having just granted a liberal constitution in 1848)

The last few pages of The Making of Doctor Who deserve their own separate post: for some reason, it was felt necessary or appropriate to include a short essay by “the Rev John D Beckwith, AKC, Chaplain to the Bishop of Edmonton” about the relationship of Doctor Who in particular and sf in general with Christianity in particular and religion in general. It is a rather bizarre piece of writing; I do wonder why Dicks and Hulke (or their editor) felt it should be in the book. Anyway, I am posting it beneath the cut; make up your own minds.

5) The Making of Doctor Who, by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks

Way way back in the mists of childhood, and I got hold of the second edition of this book, which was tremendously informative about Doctor Who up to, I think, The Hand of Fear, but was particularly important for me as it was the first book I had read which was about sf; it was possible, I realised, to think and write more deeply about sf as well as just reading it.

This is the first edition, which states on the first page, “Doctor Who has now been running over eight years, which makes it one of the most successful shows on British television.” I think I got it at WorldCon. It is very much aimed at a younger audience; quite a long chapter, for instance, on how a television programme is actually made, what the director does, etc. Here is the end of the section about the Master:

That last bit seems rather prophetic now!

One section which was completely changed in the second edition was the re-telling of the Doctor’s televised adventures as a continuous narrative, presented as memoranda from the files of the Time Lords and of UNIT. (The second edition simply presented each story separately in a list, as all serious Doctor Who reference books have done since.) This section is preceded by the indictment and initial defence for the Doctor at the end of The War Games, revealing also the Doctor’s “real name”.

Of course, this bears very little resemblance to the trial we actually saw in The War Games, but it is a nice bit of chrome.

(Can we really bear to refer to the Doctor as ∂³∑x² in future?)

Anyway, certainly superseded in usefulness by pretty much every work of reference on Doctor Who published since, but very nice to have.

4) The Medieval Cookbook, by Maggie Black

One of the books I discovered in last weekend’s trawl through the shelves. Some interesting possibilities here, which I will report back on as and when my experiments progress.

From WikiPedia

was asking what classic Who he should watch to get up to speed (or, as he put it, to become “a legitimate Who fanboy”). He already has Genesis of the daleks and The Deadly Assassin; my other recommendations to him were as follows.

First Doctor
The first two stories, An Unearthly Child and The Daleks; then I think the Dalek Invasion of Earth, and finally The Tenth Planet (where unfortunately most of the crucial fourth episode is lost). The Daleks Master Plan is also really good but unfortunately only three of the twelve (or thirteen, depending how you count) episodes survive on video.

Second Doctor
Sadly most of the stories have been destroyed, at least in video format; the best surviving ones are the Tomb of the Cybermen, the Mind Robber, The Invasion and The War Games.

Third Doctor
Starts really well with Spearhead From Space, and then Inferno; then try Terror of the Autons (first story with Jo and the Master), The Three Doctors (a bit silly but if you have followed the course so far you will be keen for nostalgia), Carnival of Monsters and The Green Death

Fourth Doctor
Well, you’ve got two of the best – some would even say the two best – already. I would also recommend The Ark in Space, Pyramids of Mars, The Robots of Death, The Talons of Weng-Chiang and City of Death.

Fifth Doctor
Much more difficult to pick here. The only ones I have re-watched recently are Earthshock (not so great), The Five Doctors (OK) and The Caves of Androzani (brilliant – directed by Graeme Harper who has also directed several of the better episodes of New Who). But I also plan to go back and re-watch the linked stories Kinda and Snakedance some time fairly soon, and I have very good memories of Mawdryn Undead.

Sixth Doctor
There is a widespread view in fandom that holds that all the Sixth Doctor stories were terrible. I agree with that view, but you may want to make up your own mind.

Seventh Doctor
I really liked two of the last three stories ever broadcast, Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric. I don’t like Remembrance of the Daleks, though almost everyone else does.

Eighth Doctor
Only one story, but you have to have watched it to gain your fannish credentials!

Discussion welcome!

3) Pussey!, by Daniel Clowes

I’ve liked some of Clowes’ work, but you can give this one a miss; a graphic novel about being a graphic novelist, exploited and corrupted by the system; unattractive, caricatured characters, and not really sure if he was satirising his own experience or some received wisdom about how the industry works.

1. Go into the archives of your LJ.
2. Find your 42nd entry ever. Yes, this may require some counting and basic maths. Deal with it.
3. Link to that entry in a new entry. This is the meaning of your life.

My 42nd entry was about buying sf books in London, and drew a response from the late . Certainly true that I spend a lot of time on both London and sf books, but I don’t think it is my entire life!

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4-7 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest (unless it’s too troublesome to reach and is really heavy. Then go back to step 1).

The nearest book is Patrick Carroll’s Science, Culture and Modern State Formation for which I’m approaching a review deadline. The relevant sentences are about the views of the 18th century Austrian writer Johan Frank about the policing of public events:

In relation to the policing of popular entertainments, he was acutely aware of the need for police personnel to be dispatched with good judgment and respect for citizens. The notion that the police could “lord it over” the citizens had the result that the public, instead of feeling grateful for the “care” police provided, expressed the “greatest aversion to everything that is called police, and considers as nothing all the good that the police provides against the tyranny of … impetuous judgments.” Frank compared the “obstinacy of the police superintendent” to stubborn parents who rule their child with an “iron rod”. Such a mode of policing, exercised under the “pretense of good order,” could only result in the police earning the “hatred of the entire nation.”

Has a certain contemporary resonance, doesn’t it?

I’ve just been added as a friend on Facebook by the editor of the Guardian. Bizarre; I don’t think I’ve ever had dealings with him, apart from one email sent by me (and not replied to) eighteen months ago, and certainly don’t remember sending him a friending request!

2) Vicious Circles and Infinity: An Anthology of Paradoxes, by Patrick Hughes and George Brecht

A very slim Penguin (75 pages) found while sorting the books at the weekend. Goes through the standard paradoxes – the class of all classes that do not include themselves, Zeno, Cantor on infinity, the unexpected hanging, etc, and many variations. Slightly confusing layout in that every page has a vaguely relevant quotation at both top and bottom, which breaks up the main text rather abruptly. Mostly of interest to teenage proto-geeks, but I laughed out loud when Russell, worrying about the class of all classes that do not include themselves, confides his concerns to Whitehead, who ripostes, “never glad confident morning again!” You bastard, Whitehead, is the thought which probably went through Russell’s mind.

The book did help me crystallise a serious point too. Logic and science are powerful tools for exploring and explaining the natural and human worlds. But as this book reminds us, they are necessarily incomplete, and sometimes contradictory; just like any other system of thought ever developed by humans. This is why I take Richard Dawkins’ views on biology more seriously than his views on religion.