From The Sensorites, spisode 6 (hat-tip, with spoilers for Gridlock, to ).

Sound familiar?

I have to say that of all old-school Doctor Who monsters to return, I really didn’t expect the Macra!

I loved this. The traffic jam was neatly claustrophobic, the use of hymn tunes tremendously evocative, and the Doctor having to tell the truth about why he lied to Martha.

Sure, not a lot was made of the Macra other than some impressive CGI imagery, but I suspect they did better this time round than last time.

11) Alias vol. 1, by Brian Michael Bendis

An impulse buy in Forbidden Planet yesterday after this discussion. A very nicely done story of a woman with superpowers sucked into a plot to bring down leading political figures. I would probably have enjoyed it even more if I was more familiar with the Marvel universe.

10) Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

Vinge has sometimes left me a bit cold, but I rather enjoyed this Hugo nominee. In particular, after a run of really bad stories about cures for Alzheimer’s which seemed to feature on the shortlist every year for the last while, it was rather good to have a central character whose Alzheimer’s is cured, and this is only the start of his and his family’s problems.

That’s not the main part of the plot, which is a complex tale of intelligence (both agencies and artificial), set in the brilliantly realised environment of UC San Diego a few decades from now. Of course, it’s a landscape Vinge must know well, but I think he has brought it to life in loving detail here. Indeed, I have to rate his worldbuilding (of a familiar world) rather ahead of the complex story, involving three generations of the same family in the conspiracy by sheer coincidence.

There’s lots to like here, and I suspect (given Vinge’s previous record) this probably has a good chance of winning the award. I’m not wildly grabbed by it, though, and I wonder whether either of the other two nominees will grab me in the same way that Spin did last year, or River of Gods the year before.

Top 5 UnSuggestions for this book:

1. The awakening by Kate Chopin
2. My sister’s keeper : a novel by Jodi Picoult
3. Blue like jazz : nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality by Donald Miller
4. Lucky by Alice Sebold
5. Balzac and the little Chinese seamstress by Dai Sijie

Am sitting on Eurostar en route to London and ultimately Bath, where I am staying tonight and speaking at a conference tomorrow. I managed to get through the four plays in the first Gallifrey sequence this week, and they are fun and enjoyable if not necessarily great works of literature.

Let’s face it, for someone like me who is a child of the Fourth Doctor era, the only two companions who matter, apart from the incomparable Sarah Jane Smith of course, are Leela and Romana. And K-9. And, er, K-9. The idea of putting Louise Jameson, Lalla Ward and John Leeson (and John Leeson) together with a half-decent script is so obvious in retrospect that you wonder why it wasn’t done as a series much earlier (OK, it had been done in Marc Platt’s novel Lungbarrow, and in a Big Finish play I haven’t heard yet).

The four plays have the common themes of President Romana grappling with the difficulties of a stolen “time-onic fusion device”, and of Leela trying both to come to terms with and to solve the disappearance and probable death of her husband Andred. Much flinging around of Time Lord lore, the rivalry between the Celestial Intervention Agency and the Chancellery Guard, and the Borusa-like character of Cardinal Braxiatel.

However each has a quite different setting. 1.1 Weapon of Choice has the Time Lords dealing with a crisis on a refugee planet, and reflected interestingly on the topic of humanitarian military interventions. 1.2 Square One features Leela going undercover as an exotic dancer at a summit of the Time Lords and their fellow time-travelling powers; it also has the gimmick of certain scenes being repeated due to a time loop. 1.3 The Inquiry has certain resonances with both The Deadly Assassin and (I suspect) the Trial of a Time Lord (with which I remain blissfully unacquainted); I felt it was the thinnest of the four. And finally 1.4 A Blind Eye has the peculiar but well-realised setting of the Vienna to Calais train on the outbreak of World War II. (And here am I on the Brussels to London train writing this, and hoping for a less eventful trip.)

It’s fun, but not very deep. There is a risk of turning Leela into a one-joke character, which is generally just about averted (except, frankly, in Square One) by giving her the Andred back story. Romana as president is as sharp and sassy as ever, but we lose a certain amount of potential narrative tension by knowing that she is always in the right. K-9 is as ever, and the other characters give their best.

I particularly liked the first and fourth of these four plays, both of which are by Alan Barnes, who hadn’t previously registered on my consciousness as a Who writer. I will look out for more of his stuff, and listen to more Gallifrey as well.
——————

I will post more on this later, with audio evidence, but I am fascinated by the fact that the theme music for the Gallifrey series of audio plays, featuring ex-Doctor Who companions Romana and Leela, sounds very similar to the theme music for Torchwood, which features ex-Doctor Who companion Jack Harkness.

Hmmm.
——————

Three more Doctor Who audio dramas from Big Finish to review.

The Fearmonger: Seventh Doctor and Ace get mixed up in future fascist leader’s plans to take over Britain. Jacqueline Pearce (aka Servalan in Blake’s 7) is excellent as the fascist leader herself. There is some interesting business with Ace’s perceptions of herself and of the Doctor, being shaped by the Fearmonger creature (which itself had certain resonances with the Timewyrm of the New Adventures). But there were some definite plot implausibilities, and Sophie Aldred’s husband, Vince Henderson, playing the shock-jock radio presenter, really didn’t seem to have much of a clue what was going on, using accent rather than acting to establish the character.

The Marian Conspiracy: Sixth Doctor and new companion Evelyn Smythe visit the court of Queen Mary I. A peculiar combination of character and cliché, which really suffered in my estimation because I listened to it so close to the broadcast of The Shakespeare Code. Evelyn Smythe, played by Maggie Stables, is a delight and I look forward with great interest to future audio plays featuring her. But the play itself: oh dear. The reign of Queen Mary is not a well-known part of British history, and you can either deal with it properly or just go for a period romp; I don’t think The Marian Conspiracy does either. And time-travel clichés are piled atop one another.

The Genocide Machines: The Seventh Doctor and Ace visit a ginormous library and confront the Daleks. Excellent. I loved: the Daleks themselves; the concept of a library storing all knowledge in the galaxy (impossible though I know it to be); the duplicate Ace demonstrating the Sophie Aldred can act (something I have occasionally had cause to doubt); and especially the many many references to other Dalek series – jungle planet with unseen indigenous species (Daleks’ Master Plan), Daleks modified by their own plan who turn against the leadership (Evil of the Daleks), the Doctor’s references to the interests of the Time Lords and the Matrix (Deadly Assassin), and a slight nod forward to the Dalek absorbing all human knowledge in 2005’s Dalek story. Was this the first time Nick Briggs did the Dalek voices? He’s very good. My one quibble is that I found it difficult to tell apart Louise Falkner, playing Bev Tarrant (who I understand is a recurring Big Finish character) and Sophie Aldred as Ace. Probably my hearing.

In summary: I’m generally enjoying these, and thought that The Genocide Machine was very good indeed – the first really gripping one I have heard. Though I think I may switch to one of the spinoff series for a while for variety’s sake.

9) Glasshouse, by Charles Stross

And so, continuing with this year’s Hugo nominees… I think this is my favourite of Charlie’s books so far. In his previous sf books I’ve tended to find myself overwhelmed by the ideas about far-future post-Singularity existence; those are all still here, but very nicely balanced by the experience of the narrator who has signed up for a social experiment attempting to simulate the “dark ages”, ie human society from 1950 to 2040, a period from which most information has been lost because paper was being used less and the digital media used for storage all became obsolete. This gives us an excuse for many sideswipes at the nature of American/European society as it is today; but in the meantime the far-future background is being unfolded in more and more detail, and the narrator becomes conscious of his/her own unreliability – often I find the “unreliable narrator” a really annoying excuse for incomplete world-building or sloppy characterisation, but Glasshouse very much avoids that trap.

So far my favourite of the Hugo shortlisted novels; but I do have three more to go!

Top UnSuggestion for this book: East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I think 

autopope

 will be amused (or bemused?) by some of the other books which figure on that list, such as C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia at #9.

I liked it. If I want to know what really happened in 1599, I’ll read James ShapiroThere were a lot of cute one-liners. I liked the Harry Potter references (three altogether?); the “57 academics” line (and pretty much all the Shakespeare stuff); Martha’s reference to Ray Bradbury (which of course is particularly good if it’s a nod to this year’s overarching “Mr Saxon” theme); and the scene on the bed where Tennant’s Doctor is being particularly alien, and Martha is hoping in vain that he will act human.

Oddly enough I’ve been having a bit of a Tudor Who period in the last week; apart from this, I have been listening to the Sixth Doctor audio The Marian Conspiracy, which is set in the reign of Elizabeth’s sister Mary (separate review coming up), and my own small contribution to fanfic, inspired by this exchange from The Sensorites. Funny how the Doctor seems to have had unseen quarrels with Tudor monarchs, rather than those from other time periods, isn’t it?

Over the holiday weekend I did a number of Georgian recipes, some for the first time, some that I had succeeded with before. I know a few of you are interested in cooking, and anyway posting them here is a good way of keeping the recipes to hand if I should ever find myself somewhere without the recipe book but with an internet connection (and adds to previous posts).

1) Chicken with herbs (Chakhokhbili) – total preparation time about an hour and a half; recipe claims it serves 6 to 8 but in fact I found it about right for five. The recipe stipulates that you must chop up the chicken by hand yourself into about ten pieces. Probably you could do this with just pre-packed legs or breasts, but it goes against the spirit of it.

2 tablespoons/30g/1 oz butter
One 3-pound/1.5kg chicken
4 medium onions, peeled and chopped
8 medium tomatoes, peeled and coarsely chopped
3 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
Generous ½ cup chopped mixed herbs (parsley, cilantro/coriander, tarragon, basil, dill) – really worth buying them fresh and chopping by hand
pinch of dried hot red pepper flakes
Salt
Ground black pepper

Melt the butter; brown the chicken pieces; stir in the onions and cook for ten minutes.
Add the tomatoes and cook, covered for 30 minutes (or until the chicken is done).
Stir in the garlic, herbs, hot pepper and salt and pepper to taste; cook, covered for another five minutes.
Let stand for another five minutes and serve.

2) Green beans with egg (Mtsvane Lobios Chirbuli) – total cooking time about 45 mins; recipe claims it serves 4 but I think that is only as a side dish (in our case, with the chicken). I found I had used too much water and butter, and had to add a second egg to even things out, with much more stirring and cooking towards the end than perhaps should have been the case.

2 sprigs basil
1 sprig tarragon
2 sprigs summer savory/rocket
1 sprig dill
1 sprig parsley
½ pound/250g green beans
water
1 small onion, minced
¼ teaspoon/1g salt
6 tablespoons/80g butter
1 egg, beaten

Coarsely chop the herbs. Trim the beans and cut into small pieces. Place the beans in a single layer (hah! that’s what the recipe says, but it is simply impossible!) in a pan and add enough water to half cover them. Bring to a boil, stir in the onion, salt and chopped herbs. Cover and simmer until the beans are soft and the water has been absorbed, 10-15 mins. Add the butter and sauté the beans lightly until the butter has melted. Then pour on the beaten egg, cover and cook for 2-3 mins, or just until the egg has set. Stir lightly and turn out into a bowl.

3) Khinkali/ხინკალი. These are real Georgian delicacies, dumplings stuffed with meat (though you can use cheese as well) and poached. See the Wikipedia article for a picture of them. I really love them, and approached the cooking process with reverence and trepidation, not least because it is years since I last grappled with any cooking involving pastry; I couldn’t actually remember the last time I used a rolling pin. I didn’t use enough flour on the working surface, so found that the result was a bit sticky, and unfortunately the bottoms fell off the earlier ones I made. Still, they tasted delicious even if the presentation wasn’t quite what I had hoped. This recipe claims to make 25 but my unpracticed technique delivered only about 18. It’s enough food for four or five people though. Took me about two hours but that would be less with practice.

4 cups/500g white flour
1¼ teaspoons/5g salt
1¼ cups/300ml warm water

1 pound/450g mixed minced beef and pork
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
1¼ teaspoons/5g salt
Pinch cayenne pepper
¼ teaspoon ground caraway seed (I used cumin instead)
3 small onions, peeled and minced
½ cup/120ml warm water of beef bouillon (I used beef stock)

Combine the flour, salt and warm water to make a firm dough. Knead for 5 mins, and leave, covered, for 30-40 mins.
For the filling, mix the minced meat and spices; stir in the onions; and then knead in the water or bouillon by hand.
Divided the dough into 25 pieces. Roll each piece out to a six-inch/15cm circle. Place about 2 tablespoons/30g of filling in the centre of each round. Then (and this is the really tricky bit) fold the edges of the dough in to the centre making accordion pleats; move clockwise, allowing each fold to overlap the previous one; twist the pleats together at the top to seal. (Again, consult the Wikipedia picture for an idea of what is wanted.)
Cook the Khinkali in boiling salted water for 12-15 minutes, then serve hot, with black pepper.

To eat them, hold up by the topknot, and carefully bite off the bottom corner so that you can catch the stream of juice in your mouth. After eating the meaty part, you don’t have to eat the topknot itself (traditionally thrown to any passing dogs). Yummy.

Ἰησοῦν ζητεῖτε τὸν Ναζαρηνὸν τὸν ἐσταυρωμένον: ἠγέρθη!

8) Temeraire, by Naomi Novik

This is the first Hugo year I can remember (since about 2000) when I had not read a single one of the nominated pieces of fiction before the shortlist came out, but this probably reflects more on my efforts to catch up with classic non-genre literature over the last while than on anything about the quality of the list. I reckon this is the front-runner, though: LibraryThing users own more copies of it than of the the other four nominees combined (as of today, 621 to a combined 479 for the rest), and while general exposure to the book-buying public doesn’t necessary correlate directly with Hugo voters’ preferences, it seldom runs exactly opposite to them either.

I enjoyed it. I was one of the teenagers who really loved Anne McCaffrey’s books on first reading them and then realised that they were rubbish – one of my worst experiences of disillusionment with any author. This story of dragons in the Napoleonic wars is a brilliant counterblast: the internal politicking of the dragonriders is all too true to life, and the girl dragons (and their girl riders) get to fight as well as their male counterparts (though for some reason this is not public knowledge). I’m also in the camp of those who enjoyed Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, though I hated David Weber’s efforts. And I also liked the few Patrick O’Brian novels I have read, so it’s not a big surprise that I liked this.

Novik scores in my book for a sensitivity to nineteenth-century language which few writers can manage; also for her convincing portrayal of a subtly different history and society from what we are used to (as I said above, I found the internal politicking of the dragonriders most compelling). Towards the end of the book she changes one important detail in a well-known historical event in our timeline, with the result that the reader is suddenly thrown into real suspense as to how closely her world’s history is going to map our own – a difficult trick to pull off.

I don’t rate this as highly as the last three Hugo winners, but it is a good start to my Hugo reading season none the less.

Top five UnSuggestions for this book:

1. A generous or+hodoxy by Brian D. McLaren
2. Institutes of the Christian religion by John Calvin
   
3. Libra by Don DeLillo
   
4. The power of now : a guide to spiritual enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle
   
5. Laughable loves by Milan Kundera
   

Well, I see that the Philip K Dick award went to Spin Control by Chris Moriarty, which I thought a respectable enough nominee, though at least they gave a special commendation to Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival which was the book I would have voted for.

(Anyone want to see how the First Doctor met Henry VIII? Movin’ swiftly on…)

7) The Last Temptation, by Neil Gaiman

I have found a nice little second hand bookshop near work, on the rue Froissart between rue Belliard and place Jourdan. It has a decently eclectic selection of books in English, which rather look like they were mostly bequeathed by retiring British officials in the European Commission. Not all, though, and this graphic novel by Neil Gaiman sort of jumped out at me saying “Me! Me! Buy me!” And when a book says that, then I usually succumb to temptation.

And appropriately enough, this book is about temptation, written by Neil Gaiman in consultation with Alice Cooper, tying in with Cooper’s album of the same name. I know almost nothing about Cooper except that he wears make-up. Even so, I really enjoyed this brief tale of Steven, an adolescent who is tempted by the sinister manager of the Theatre of the Real (a Cooper lookalike) with the offer of eternal life at an unspeakable price. It would have been better to read it at Halloween; it would certainly have meant more if I was a Cooper fan; but I felt it was also in some ways a trial piece for Gaiman’s American Gods, and all the more interesting for that.
——————

splinister

 has the links.

It’s just over three months since I left my previous place of work. I see that of the 25 people listed today on the website as working in the Brussels headquarters, five are new since I left (plus one intern promoted to a paid position), and there are another two whose positions are advertised as vacancies (so are presumably leaving). And that doesn’t include my successor, who is doing my old job but hasn’t moved to Brussels yet.

Hmm. I think I am well out of it.

My review of this year’s Philip K Dick shortlisted novels is up at Strange Horizons.

It may or may not be significant that five of the seven novels are published by Bantam Spectra. It may or may not be significant that five out of the seven authors are women. It is probably not significant that five of the seven have one-word titles.

Comments turned off on this entry to encourage people to comment over there.

5) The Search For Roots: a personal anthology, compiled by Primo Levi
6) The Book of Imaginary Beings, compiled by Jorge Luis Borges

Quite by accident, this turned into an interesting paired reading: both books are selections from literature and science made by writers who were great in their own right. Levi‘s collection is the more interesting of the two: a series of extracts ranging from one page to six of thirty favourite pieces of reading. I only knew four of them (The Book of Job, Gulliver’s Travels, Moby-Dick and Murder in the Cathedral) and some of the others I think lose rather in translation (eg the Italian vernacular poetry of Giuseppe Belli) but there were a few pieces here from authors I would like to follow up for myself some time (Thomas Mann, Rabelais).

Job chapter 40, on the Behemoth, pops up again in Borges’ light-hearted compilation of tales of strange animals from the ancients to C.S. Lewis (whose Perelandra is quoted twice at length). Not really a lot more to say about it than that, though I realised that it had provided much source material for another important work of my youth.

Top UnSuggestion for The Book of Imaginary Beings: Sophie Kinsella’s Confessions of a Shopaholic.

…to

wwhyte

 and Steph on their new arrival! And rather thrilling to hear her little voice down the phone just now.

(And I must say it’s nice to have a niece. I have an eight-year-old nephew on the other side of the family, but until today no nieces.)

4) [In Search of Lost Time #1] The Way By Swann’s, by Marcel Proust

I haven’t done very well in my sampling of Great Literature so far this year, so was braced for another bout of reading drudgery. But in fact I found myself completely captivated by this first of Proust’s classic series; his evocations of children’s perceptions of the world of grownups, and of what it is like to be a man in love, are simply superb. Sure, you have to smile a bit at the very long sentences – the editor protests that Proust’s reputation for this is a bit unfair, in that “only” a quarter of the text consists of sentences that are longer then ten lines – yeah, right. But it would be impossible to unwind them. The pace of the book is of course very slow but I found that part of its charm. Roll on the second volume.

Also I was taken aback by the amount of girl-on-girl action. I’m not used to that in classic literature.

Top three UnSuggestions for this book:

1. How to read the Bible for all its worth : a guide to understanding the Bible by Gordon D. Fee
2. Undead and unwed by MaryJanice Davidson
3. Brightly burning by Mercedes Lackey

3) After Dinner Speaking, by Fawcett Boom

I do quite a lot of public speaking, but there is always room to improve one’s technique. Unfortunately I found almost nothing of use in this jumble of tips, snippets and quotations. I only bought it because it was cheap, but it was a waste of £2 and of the 35 minutes it took me to read it.
——————

2) Field of Bones: An Irish Division in Gallipoli, by Philip Orr

A few years ago I posted a letter from my grandfather written from Palestine in January 1918, during the first world war, and over the last year or so I’ve been trying to get a better picture of his experiences at the end on 1915 and in 1916 with the 6th Royal Dublin Fusiliers as part of the 10th Division in Macedonia. For some reason I had not especially got into the Gallipoli side of his military career, despite the explicit reference to “9^th August” in the 1918 letter. But I spotted this book in a Belfast book shop when I was there last month, and discovered to my delight that it actually contained two references to my grandfather – one at the end to his death in 1949, but also another to his being wounded on 15 August 1915, during the British attempts to push east on the seaward side of the ridge north of Suvla Bay. This is practically the first reference I have found about him outside existing family lore. It seems that one of his friends left a fairly detailed account of the war, now in the National Army Museum archives in Chelsea.

Apart from my personal interest, I think this is a pretty good effort. Orr has very much gone for the soldier’s-eye-view of the Suvla Bay campaign (with a minor excursion to follow the Irish soldiers detached to support the Anzacs further south).Of course, it seems that in this case the geopolitical or wider strategic aspects of the campaign would not make a lot of sense; he is deliberately concentrating on the experience of the 10th (Irish) Division, not the Allied forces as a whole. Also his source material is vivid stuff and he has put it together well. I think my biggest criticism is that he does not make as much as he could of the military failure of the campaign: the total failure of the landing to achieve any of its objectives, ie holding the high ground around the bowl-like bay from which the Turks eventually shelled them out, linking up effectively with the Anzacs a few miles to the south, let alone pushing up the peninsula to Istanbul over 200 km away.

Orr also reflects on the way in which the Suvla Bay campaign has been ignored by later Irish historians, in total contrast to the nation-forging effect of the Anzac landings on the people on the far side of the world. He credits Shane McGowan of the Pogues for doing more than anyone else to raise public awareness of it in the most recent period. The problem was that the 10th Division was too broad-based in its membership; within a year of its landing at Gallipoli, more exclusive military myths had been generated by each side much closer to home (the Easter Rising and the Battle of the Somme). And while there have certainly been greater efforts made of late by the Irish state to recognise the Irish contribution to the first world war, it has tended to concentrate on the Western Front rather than events further east. This readable book will help to redress the balance. And I now know the true identity of the Stuffer.

1) In Search of the Dark Ages, by Michael Wood

This appears to be a book-of-the-TV-series dating from 1981, revised in 1987 (my copy is a 1994 reprint). I imagine the TV series must have been reasonably interesting; sadly, for much of the book I found myself wishing for more relevant illustrations and better maps.

Wood takes a straightforward tack of structuring his narrative around nine individuals from Boadicea to William the Conqueror (not that I would really have counted either of them as belonging to the ‘Dark Ages’, but there you go). It doen’t always work. One of the nine is the Sutton Hoo Man, and it’s difficult to construct a good narrative around someone when the only thing you know for sure about him is that he is dead. And the chapter on Athelstan promised to open our eyes about him and also reveal why he has been allowed to fall into obscurity; I am afraid I found my eyes glazing rather than opening, and if there was an explicit explanation of why we never hear much about him I missed it.

However, the chapters on King Arthur, Offa and Alfred were all good. (The other two are on Eric Bloodaxe and Ethelred the Unready.) I especially enjoyed the Alfred one; I found myself musing on the history of the Danelaw, which as a result of Alfred’s efforts seems to have been completely incorporated into the English polity, disappearing completely as a political entity in its own right. The Danelaw extended much further both south and west than I had realised, including both the ancestral origins of my mother-in-law in Lincolnshire and of my father-in-law in Derbyshire. And I realised something very important that had never occurred to me before (but perhaps should have):

I married a Viking.

Top UnSuggestion for this book: It, by Stephen King.

Much drama this morning. B. managed to get hold of a freshly bought bottle of photographical chemicals, and was found by my sister beaming with pride at having removed the lid and bitten through the foil top.

The bottle was covered with stickers saying ‘if ingested seek medical advice immediately’ in umpteen languages, so I called 101 for emergency services and ended up getting both police (who I hadn’t asked for, but who may have been having a boring Sunday morning and in need of some excitement) and an ambulance.

B., who like many autistic people generally prefers her own company, took it all in her stride and greeted each new set of uniformed visitors with a big smile. She was of course unable to tell us how much of the chemical she had swigged, so it was off to the hospital we went, B. clearly somewhat thrilled by the ambulance ride.

Once there, the nice folks in casualty had a look at her and determined that the chemical in question was largely citric acid, so heavily concentrated that it has a pH of 1; if B. had had enough to do her any harm, she would not have been in such a sunny mood. So we went home relieved.

My sister had bought the stuff for her husband’s photographic studio. He is colour-blind, so works only in black and white photography. Apparently the equivalent chemical in the process of developing colour photographs is much nastier. One should be thankful for small mercies.
——————

In case you are interested in what other people write about Doctor Who, here are all the links (so far) off my f-list about last night’s episode:

wwhyte, jekesta, puritybrown, purple_pen, Paul Cornell, jeanne_dark, Neil Fawcett, me, watervole, qatsi, blue_condition, matgb, doyle_sb4, megolas, lonemagpie, grahamsleight, pickwick, and snapesbabe. Everyone liked it (at least a little, sometimes a lot). It’s funny how people pick up on different details – only , for instance, remarked on the literary allusion of the name of the alien’s first victim!

It was good.

Nice to see a few more people popping up on the friends notifications recently – feel free to introduce yourselves below, and maybe tell me how you found me.

Checking out whose blogrolls I am on (other than Livejournal) and there are more than I thought. Some I know (Making Light, A Fistful of Euros, Old Rottenhat, The Genre Files, The Early Days of a Better Nation, Paul Cornell's House of Awkwardness, Love and Liberty, inuit bikini scarlet carwash/Hunting Monsters, Percy's Depressed, Young Fogey, Yank in Ulster, Sixth International, Adventures of a Drama Queen, Nicu Popescu, Belgian Waffle, Tim Roll-Pickering) and some I don't, or don't think I do (EU Pundit, Random Acts of Alex, Corcaighist, De Leyenda, Quotidian Hell, Kay Abroad). Anyone in the latter category seeing this entry, or any other casual readers, do feel free to introduce yourselves as well.