To Heverlee War Cemetery, which I referred to also here

Roses between the gravestones:

King George VI’s cousin:

Well, we now know the answer to the question people have been asking for forty years: in a battle between the Daleks and the Cybermen, who would win? The interaction between the two sets of baddies was great.

Anne in the car on the way home (we were watching at a friend’s) spotted certain similiarites with the Philip Pullman trilogy. These are explored further by here and in comments to here.

Having just listened to (and watched where possible) the Dalek Master Plan, I really did think that Rose was going to go out into the void, like Katarina. Though I was happy enough with her being saved by Pete ex machina.

One of the kids watching with us muttered at 37 past the hour in that we had eight minutes left, and the plot seemed to be over. He actually stuck it out to the end but his two elder brothers fled as soon as (as put it) Rose’s make-up started melting.

Yeah, the very end went on a wee bit – but it’s not the worst padding we’ve seen from Russell T Davies in his own episodes. The only bit that was really silly was cyber-Yvonne weeping (?oil?).

Edited to add: Anne asks, what about the Cybermen who were Cyber-ised on our Earth – surely they were unaffected by passage through the Void, and therefore shouldn’t have been sucked in? But maybe the materials for Cyber-ising them were brought across?

In summary: Very good stuff, and very nearly great.

Yes, it’s come to Belgium! (A million thanks to who spotted it.) So we zoomed up to Antwerp this morning and it was just fantastic.

and numerous videos.

John Quiggin on the novels

John DeNardo on all the short fiction nominees

Anne K.G. Murphy/ on the novelettes and short stories.

and on the short stories, here and here respectively.

Have added notes of all these, and of the Locus and Sturgeon awards, to the web page.

3) The Economist Style Guide

Mandatory reading for those of us doing editing for a living, of course. Full of useful snippets and helpful hints, though I dare to disagree on a few points:

Dominicans Take care. Do they come from Dominica? Or the Dominican Republic? Or are they friars?

*Snerk!*

federalist in Britain, someone who believes in centralising the powers of associated states; in the United States and Europe, someone who believes in decentralising them.

Perhaps that one was a bit more tongue-in-cheek.

Abbreviations that can be pronounced and are composed of bits of words rather than just initials should be spelt out in upper and lower case

Agreed, but their examples include “Kfor” and “Sfor” which I would always spell KFOR and SFOR, since that is and was the capitalisation preferred by the peacekeepers themselves.

Put the accents and cedillas on French names and words, umlauts on German ones, accents and tildes on Spanish ones, and accents, cedillas and tildes on Portuguese ones: Françoise de Panafieu, Wolfgang Schäuble, Federico Peña. Leave the accents off other foreign names.

C’mon, in this day and age I think we should be able to go a long way in spelling names correctly even if the version of the Latin alphabet used in unfamiliar. Though I accept that Đà Nẵng, for instance, has an English spelling of Da Nang.

Capitalisation rules – much tougher than I would be inclined to be, with odd lapses from that toughness – why, for instance, “the queen” but “the Queen’s Speech”?

community is a useful word in the context of religious or ethnic groups. But in many other others [sic] it jars. Not only is it often unnecessary, it also purports to convey a sense of togetherness that may not exist.
The intelligence community means spies.
The online community means geeks and nerds.

*Hmph!*

It is sometimes useful to talk of human-rights abuses but often the sentence can be rephrased more pithily and accurately. The army is accused of committing numerous human-rights abuses probably means The army is accused of torture and murder.

Fair point. Though Anne wonders if the latter phrase is not in fact more precise, while being equally accurate.

haver means to talk nonsense, not dither, swither or waver.

Really?

There is an insanely complex set of rules for the correct spelling in English of Russian names, almost all of which I agree with, apart from the idea that you should always transliterate “дж” as “j”; giving as an example Stalin’s real surname, Jugashvili. I would always write Dzhugashvili. (Though of course in his native Georgian it was ჯუღაშვილი which I would transliterate as Jugashvili, as “ჯ” is normally transcribed “j”; but we know him through translation from the Russian.) They then go on to add, absurdly, that his first name should be spelt “Josef” not “Iosif”. I would have said that the man know to us as “Joseph Stalin” was born “Iosif Dzhugashvili”. (Accepting Иосиф Джугашвили ratehr than იოსებ ჯუღაშვილი as the more official version of his original name.)

Placenames: I’m glad that they are with me on Transdniestria, rather than “Transnistria” which is gaining ground. But there’s no way I’m using “Leghorn” for Livorno.

More places: The list of administrative divisions of Belgium, bafflingly, lists only nine provinces, omitting Brussels (and Flanders and Wallonia), though there is a hint that Brabant can be Flemish or Walloon. And the list of Swiss cantons, while including without explanation the splits of Appenzell and Unterwalden, does not mention that Basel is similarly split.

Will keep it by my desk though.

Was at a Finnish embassy reception this evening, in view of their EU presidency, and they had four singers performing beautifully melodious songs. Finnish is one of the most pleasant languages to listen to – I guess euphonic is the right adjective – that I come into contact with. Can’t understand a word, of course, but I love hearing it.

And earlier in the day, a combination of a Moldova meeting and reminded me of this. Vrei să pleci dar nu mă, nu mă iei, Nu mă, nu mă iei, nu mă, nu mă, nu mă iei! Chipul tău şi dragostea din tei, Mi-amintesc de ochii tăi iei!

And finally, points us to this wonderful resource of Persian music.

US Armed Forces Journal publishes article recommending redrawing borders of every country between Greece, India and Egypt.

Carl Bildt thinks this is insanely stupid and dangerous.

From , here

John Scalzi puts me 35th out of the top 51 blogs on science fiction and fantasy. That’s very nice of him, considering the things I said about his book! Of course, you don’t have to believe him; you just have to believe in the power of Technorati.

2) The Prisoner, by Thomas M. Disch

Picked this up off the family shelves when in Ireland a couple of years ago; prodded into reading it now by ‘s livejournal, which is, entertainingly, written in very much the same style, 37 years later.

I understand that hardcore Prisoner fans do not regard this novel as canonical, but I think it’s pretty true to the spirit of the TV series, and most plot discrepancies can be explained as artifically induced hallucinations. My favourite moment is when Number 6 is about to escape in a hastily constructed metal cage (to protect him from the attentions of Rover and his cousins) but is frustrated by landscape at a crucial juncture.

Must go and buy the DVDs now.

He has been named the 2006 Dick Enberg Award winner by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA), an award given annually to a person whose actions and commitment have furthered the meaning and reach of the Academic All-America Teams Program and/or the student-athlete while promoting the values of education and academics.

I haven’t a clue what any of that means, but it’s worthy of celebration anyway.

The two Georgian recipes I did the other night (from the Darra Goldstein book, us, uk):

NB – quantities are given in American, so I had to estimate. But Georgian recipes are more a matter of adherence to the spirit than the letter of what is intended, so you just go with what seems right.

Salmon Buglama (ie stew)

¾ cup oil
2 pounds (ie 900g) salmon, cut into 1 ½ inch (4 cm) pieces
Salt
Freshly ground pepper
1 cup chopped cilantro (ie coriander)
2 medium onions, peeled, sliced and separated into rings
2 small lemons, sliced
4 bay leaves
1 ½ lb sliced tomatoes (or 700g tinned)
garlic to taste

Use a deep saucepan and stack up the stew in the following order: ¼ cup oil; salmon; salt and pepper; cilantro/coriander; onions; lemons; bayleaves; another ¼ cup oil; tomatoes; the final ¼ cup oil; more salt and pepper, and garlic if you like. Cover the pot, bring to a boil, simmer over a low heat for 15 minutes, eat it up. Dead easy.

Soko Arazhanit (mushrooms in cream)

1 tablespoon butter
1 pound (500g) mushrooms, thickly sliced
salt
freshly ground pepper
1 ½ cups (I reckon about 200g) heavy cream

4 handfuls of fresh parsley
4 handfuls of fresh dill
5 whole black peppercorns
2 inches (5 cm) of cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
3 cloves

Melt the butter. Toss the mushrooms in the butter. Add salt and pepper. Heat the cream to boiling and pour over the mushrooms.

Now for the tricky bit. Tie the remaining ingredients into a “cheesecloth bag” (as previously noted, I disassembled some teabags and used them instead) and add to the mushrooms.

Cover and simmer for 45-50 minutes. Remove the cheesecloth bag (or in my case the teabags) and serve.

There are several of you on my f-list who are professional editors. Are there any textbooks on editing you would recommend, or even training courses this side of the Atlantic?

Jefferson’s own account here:

It appearing in the course of these debates that the colonies of N. York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina were not yet matured for falling from the parent stem, but that they were fast advancing to that state, it was thought most prudent to wait a while for them, and to postpone the final decision to July 1, but that this might occasion as little delay as possible a committee was appointed to prepare a declaration of independence. The committee were J. Adams, Dr. Franklin, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston & myself. Committees were also appointed at the same time to prepare a plan of confederation for the colonies, and to state the terms proper to be proposed for foreign alliance.

The committee for drawing the declaration of Independence desired me to do it. It was accordingly done, and being approved by them, I reported it to the house on Friday the 28th of June when it was read and ordered to lie on the table.

[…]

Congress proceeded the same day to consider the declaration of Independence which had been reported & lain on the table the Friday preceding, and on Monday referred to a committee of the whole. The pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many. For this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offence. The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others. The debates having taken up the greater parts of the 2d 3d & 4th days of July were, in the evening of the last, closed the declaration was reported by the committee, agreed to by the house and signed by every member present except Mr. Dickinson. As the sentiments of men are known not only by what they receive, but what they reject also, I will state the form of the declaration as originally reported.

In his memoirs, Jefferson supplies only the version presented by the Committee to Congress. Fortunately the original draft survives, in his handwriting, with annotations by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams:

To those who are celebrating it, happy 4 July!

Well, never again will I dare to express an opinion on other people’s book reviews without first familiarising myself with professional standards of book reviewing. Just imagine! I thought that it was enough to be a simple reader, and make judgements as if they were a matter of taste! But has opened my eyes, with the force of reasoned argument, and I now realise that those of us without his extensive experience can say nothing worth listening to on the subject.

Full disclosure: I use Librarything and am getting to grips with LinkedIn. I also have a Soflow account which I never use.

I need to send a dollar cheque to someone who won’t take paypal or credit cards. Is there anyone US-based on my f-list who could send them a cheque and accept a refund via PayPal (or indeed Amazon vouchers)? (Comments screened)

Edited to add – thanks, all, I think that’s sorted.

Two more Georgian recipes to do again:

Salmon Buglama, a stew with coriander and lemon
Soko Arazhanit, mushrooms in cream.

The latter was the more technically taxing, in fact. My recipe book demands that the herby ingredients be tied into cheescloth, which is an alien concept this side of the Atlantic. So, on Anne’s suggestion, I unstapled and emptied a couple of tea bags, stuffed the herbs in instead, and stapled them shut again with the desk stapler from our study. It seemed to work OK.

And our visitors from Manchester seemed satisfied.

1) Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman

Now only five Nebula winners left to read – Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg, The Healer's War by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick, and The Terminal Experiment by Robert J Sawyer. This got Haldeman his third Nebula for best Novel earlier this year (and led to him surfing my website).

Well, its high points are less high but its low points not as low as the three other books on the Nebula shortlist which I had read (Air, Going Postal and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell). It bears a very strong resemblance to Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, with the story being the interweaving of two threads about immortals (in this case, probably alien) living in our world, who are drawn together by an alien artifact discovered in the Pacific Ocean in 2019. Indeed, perhaps the award of the Nebula was partly a tribute to Butler's novel. Haldeman, of course, puts his own riffs on it – basically, he brings in much more science, and much more of the military, and makes it into a love story as well. All adds up to a very enjoyable book, which I would certainly have overlooked if it had not won the award.

Football: it was the right result, sorry folks. (Actually this seems to be the consensus among English folks on my f-list.)

Doctor Who – superb! Watching it with three people who are somewhat less Whovian than me, but we all practically cheered at the final scene!

14) Foundation, by Isaac Asimov
15) Foundation and Empire, by Isaac Asimov
16) Second Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

Picked these up off the shelves after doing that Hugo meme the other day, perhaps also in an effort to recapture my early teens when I must have read them for the first time. The basic concept, as if you needed reminding, is that the scientist Hari Seldon, inventing a new discpline called psychohistory, foresees the fall of the (humans only) Galactic Empire and sets up two foundations, one at each end of the galaxy, to preserve knowledge and reduce the forecast age of barbarism from thirty thousand years to a single millennium. We follow the story of the Foundation for the first few centuries of its existence on the distant planet of Terminus, which withstands several challenges to the Seldon Plan and then unexpectedly falls to a mutant who has the power to change people’s emotions, called the Mule. The mysterious Second Foundation intervenes and neutralises the Mule; it then has to also deal with a threat from the first Foundation which seeks to discover and destroy it.

There are two basic concepts here which are completely wrong. First of all, the idea that future history can be modelled to such mathematical accuracy is surely ludicrous. As a very close observer of international politics at the highest level, it seems to me that the two fundamentals are a) the resources available to decision-makers and b) those decision-makers’ own capacity for making decisions. The second of these cannot be easliy modelled. My own view has always been, for instance, that a different leader than Milošević could have pacified the Kosovo Albanians in 1988, when their demands were basically to be left as they were rather than for independence; could have struck a deal between Serbia and Slovenia in 1990 to keep the Yugoslav Federation together; and then would have suppressed any Croat rebellion with the full support of al international actors. In fact, even the first factor, the availability of resources, cannot always be predicted: who would have expected that the meltdown in Albania in 1997, caused entirely by a fairly predictable economic event (the collapse of various pyramid schemes), would result in the looting of Albania’s well-stocked military armouries and the consequent arming of the Kosovo Liberation Army?

The second is, of course, the shadowy Higher Power guiding human affairs, at first apparently Seldon’s Plan, but later revealed to be the Second Foundation’s continuation of his work. I suspect that Asimov must have been attracted by Plato’s notion of a Republic guided by enlightened philosopher-kings; the Second Foundation certainly describes its own mission in similar terms in internal discourse. It is a popular literary trope – see the Da Vinci Code, or indeed the various websites denouncing the annual Bilderberg conferences. But there is a nasty undercurrent too to such concepts, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the more recent nonsense about Eurabia. Asimov does manage to put us in sympathy with the Second Foundation by the end, which is quite an achievement.

The three books are basically fix-ups of stories published individually in the 1940s, and in fact the volumes have little individual internal unity – the story arc of the Foundation’s encounter with the remnants of the Empire is split between volumes 1 and 2, and the arc of the Mule between volumes 2 and 3. The first few stories (after the set-up) are pretty repetitive: Asimov’s heroes defeat their enemies by brain rather than brawn, with much dialogue and little action. The introduction of the Mule – indeed, perhaps more the introduction of the first female character of any note, Bayta Darell – livens things up considerably, and we get a chase around the Galaxy on the Mule’s quest for the Second Foundation, which won the Retro-Hugo for the earliest year yet awarded, 1946. The final story, starring Arcadia Darell, Byta’s fourteen-year-old granddaughter, actually turns on the same plot twist, an unexpected revelation of the real identity of another character, but is perhaps the best written segment of all – it includes a brilliant passage about a spaceport, which makes it sound rather like Penn Station in New York – also remarkable because such descriptive passages are generally few in number.

Anyway, it’s a good re-read, but Asimov would have difficulty getting it published today. (I seem to remember in the first edition I read, many years ago, the young student in the very first story segment had the same surname as the imperial envoy in the second segment; in the new edition the latter seems to have been renamed from Dornik to Dorwin, I suppose to avoid confusion.)

…don’t leave them unattended in the same room as an expensive TV.

(Hat-tip )

I have a bit of an obsession with people who have certain things in common with me, like my exact date of birth, for instance, or shared interests via livejournal.

One sub-set of this obsession is with people who share my name. This includes a number of ancestors, going back to Sir Nicholas Whyte aka White, who lived c.1532-1592 (and died a prisoner in the Tower of London). I have mentioned a couple of others here before – a 19th-century New York architect and the president of the Huron County Federation of Agriculture.

Of course, I have a Google alert set up for my own name, and variations of it (including “Nick Whyte”, which I never use myself), which is where I got the reference to the Huron farmers’ spokesman. I would estimate that 95% of the alerts I get are about me, often flagging up interviews I had forgotten giving (indeed, in one recent case it was an interview I hadn’t given – they used stock footage of me from an interview last year and pretended it was current).

Over the last couple of days, it’s been a little different. Nicholas Whyte, the bright son of Jamaican immigrants to Brooklyn, joined the US marines and was killed by a sniper in Iraq on 21 June, two days before his 22nd burthday; his funeral was yesterday. It is a bit odd to read an obituary with one’s own name on (see here and here). From there it is a simple jump to his myspace profile, where his goal for this year, sadly unachieved, was to “stay alive”. His myspace blog has been updated with details of his wake and funeral, and of a scholarship fund in his memory. I may send them a donation.

This is an index to my various book reviews. Most of the books and stories below are reviewed on my livejournal, but a few are reviewed elsewhere – [W] indicates those reviews to be found on my own website, [SH] those on Strange Horizons, [IP] those on Infinity Plus and [ECRD] those on the Ethnic Conflict Review Digest.

I notice that I tend to write longer reviews of non-fiction books. Shorter reviews are in a smaller font below. I have not bothered to list the really short livejournal entries which basically just note that I read the book.

I also notice that the reviews below don’t at all reflect my personal tastes. Some of my favourite authors (eg Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny) are barely represented at all.

And I’ve added links to my reviews of various Doctor Who stories as seen on TV.

Well, plenty more sorting into sub-categories to do, but here’s a first go.

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Novels

Piers Anthony, Steppe
Catherine Asaro, Primary Inversion
Catherine Asaro, The Radiant Seas
Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge
[W] Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before
[IP] Stephen Baxter, Evolution
Greg Bear, Moving Mars
[W] Greg Bear, Darwin’s Radio
[IP] Chris Beckett, The Holy Machine
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: from 2000 to 1887
[SH] Amber Benson and Christopher Golden, Ghosts of Albion: Accursed
Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
Michael Bishop, No Enemy But Time
James Blish, Cities In Flight
Ray Bradbury, Green Shadows, White Whale
Keith Brooke, Keepers of the Peace
[W] Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress From this World to that which is to come
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Samuel Butler, Erewhon
Eugene Byrne, ThiGMOO
[W] Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Orson Scott Card, Heartfire
Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel’s Avatar
C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen
C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station
Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth
[W] Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17
Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection
[IP] Philip K. Dick, Cantata-140 (aka The Crack in Space)
Peter Dickinson, The Green Gene
Cory Doctorow, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom
Eric Flint and David Drake Destiny’s Shield
[W] Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys
Mary Gentle, 1610: A Sundial in a Grave
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Colin Greenland, Take Back Plenty
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Felaheen
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, 9Tail Fox
Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Stamping Butterflies
[W] Joe Haldeman, Forever Peace
[W] Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star
Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer
[W] Frank Herbert, Dune
[IP] William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderlands and Other Stories
James Patrick Hogan, Paths to Otherwhere
Richard Jeffries, After London
[IP] Tim Kenyon, Ersatz Nation
[W] Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
[W] Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Fritz Leiber, Gather, Darkness!
Fritz Leiber, The Wanderer
Paul Leonard, [Doctor Who] Genocide
Rebecca Levene, Strontium Dog: Bad Timing
“Clem Macartney” (W.D. Flackes), Ten Years to Oblivion
Ian McDonald, King of Morning, Queen of Day
[W] Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
Vonda N. McIntyre, Star Trek: Enterprise – The First Adventure
Juliet E McKenna, The Assassin’s Edge
Juliet E. McKenna, The Gambler’s Fortune
Juliet E. McKenna, The Warrior’s Bond
Katherine MacLean, Missing Man
Ian MacLeod, The Light Ages
Ken MacLeod, Learning the World
[IP] George Mann, The Human Abstract
George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
David Marusek, Counting Heads
A. Merritt, The Moon Pool
L.E. Modesitt Jr, The Ethos Effect
[IP] Michael Moorcock, The History of the Runestaff
Michael Moorcock, The Dancers at the End of Time
[IP] Caiseal Mór, Carolan’s Concerto
[IP]Caiseal Mór, The Meeting of the Waters
Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife
Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan), The Third Policeman
Pat O’Shea, The Hounds of the Morrigan
Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror for Observers
Lance Parkin, [Doctor Who] The Dying Days
Marc Platt, [Doctor Who] Lungbarrow
[W] Frederik Pohl, Gateway
Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
Terry Pratchett, Going Postal
Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies
Terry Pratchett, Thud!
Adam Roberts, On
Gareth Roberts, [Doctor Who] The Well-Mannered War
[SH] Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi
Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain
[W] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Geoff Ryman, Air, or Have Not Have
Robert Silverberg, The World Inside
Clifford Simak, Way Station
Clifford Simak, City
Dan Simmons, Ilium
Dan Simmons, Olympos
E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, Triplanetary
[W] Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Charles Stross, Accelerando
Charles Stross, The Clan Corporate
Charles Stross, The Family Trade
Charles Stross, The Hidden Family
Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue
Charles Stross, Singularity Sky
Tricia Sullivan, Maul
Steph Swainston, The Year of Our War
Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell To Earth
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Jack Vance, Tales of the Dying Earth
Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen
[W] Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
David Weber, On Basilisk Station
James White, The Dream Millennium
T.H. White, The Master
[W] Connie Willis, Doomsday Book
Robert Charles Wilson, Blind Lake
Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Roger Zelazny, Creatures of Light and Darkness
Zoran Zivkovic, Hidden Camera

Short Fiction (individual stories)

[W] Poul Anderson, “Goat Song”
[W] Isaac Asimov, “The Bicentennial Man”
[W] Isaac Asimov, “The Gods Themselves”
[IP] Stephen Baxter, Riding the Rock
[W] Greg Bear, “Blood Music”
[W] Terry Bisson, “Bears Discover Fire”
[W] Terry Bisson, “macs”
[W] Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild”
[IP] Simon A. Forward, Shell Shock
[W] Nancy Kress, “Beggars in Spain”
[W] Fritz Leiber, “Catch That Zeppelin”
[W] Fritz Leiber, “Gonna Roll The Bones”
[W] Connie Willis, “Even the Queen”
[W] Connie Willis, “Fire Watch”

Doctor Who (TV – see above for novels)

First Doctor
pilot
first episode
The Daleks
The Edge of Destruction
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
The Crusade
The Chase
The Massacre
Second Doctor
Fury From The Deep
Third Doctor
Spearhead from Space
The Green Death
Fourth Doctor
The Ark In Space
The Sontaran Experiment
Genesis of the Daleks (and here)
Pyramids of Mars
Fifth/Sixth/Seventh Doctors
The Sirens of Time (audio)
Seventh Doctor
Remembrance of the Daleks
Ninth Doctor
Rose (and here)
Dalek: here, here, here, here, here and here
The Long Game
Father’s Day
The Empty Child (and here)
The Doctor Dances
Bad Wolf (and here)
The Parting of the Ways:
Tenth Doctor
The Christmas Invasion
New Earth
School Reunion: here, here and here
The Girl in the Fireplace
Rise of the Cybermen
The Age of Steel
The Idiot’s Lantern
The Impossible Planet
Love and Monsters
Fear Her
Other
The Curse of Fatal Death
Lust in Space

(other people’s reference posts on DW: Alex Wilcock,

  here,

  here,

  on the Ninth Doctor here.)

Other Fiction

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
Ivo Andrić, In The Days of the Consuls
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (Part I)
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch, Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry
Emma Donoghue, The Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits
Apostolos Doxiades, Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Carl Hiaasen, Skinny Dip
Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Tove Jansson, The Summer Book
Magnus Mills, The Scheme for Full Employment
Olivia Manning, The Balkan Trilogy
Phil O’Brien, Memories of the Irish Israeli War
Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter
Shot’ha Rust’hveli, The Knight in the Tiger Skin
Veton Surroi, Azem Berisha’s One and Only Flight to the Castle
Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days

Comics

Daniel Clowes, David Boring
Daniel Clowes, Ice Haven
Daniel Clowes, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
Kim Deitch with Simon Deitch, Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Will Eisner, A Contract With God, And Other Tenement Stories
Jason Little, Shutterbug Follies
Jason Lutes, Berlin: City of Stones
Terry Moore, Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book #1
Terry Moore, Strangers in Paradise Pocket Book #2
Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Jeff Smith, Bone
Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus
Art Spiegelman, In The Shadow Of No Towers

Non-Fiction

Politics

Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlethwait, and Andrew Thomson, Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures)
Richard Caplan, International Governance of War-Torn Territories
Richard Caplan, Europe and the Recognition of New States in Yugoslavia
[ECRD] David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton
David Chandler, ed, Peace Without Politics? Ten Years of International State-Bulding in Bosnia
Simon Chesterman, You, The People
Thomas de Waal, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War
Sydney Elliott and W.D. Flackes with John Coulter, Northern Ireland: A Political Directory 1968-1999
Dirk-Jan Eppink, Avonturen van een Nederbelg: Een Nederlander ontdekt België
Thammy Evans, Macedonia: The Bradt Travel Guide
[ECRD] Danica Fink-Hafner and John R. Robbins (eds), Making A New Nation
Tom Gallagher, Theft of A Nation: Romania since Communism
Peter M. Haas (ed), Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination
Bardh Hamzaj / Ramush Haradinaj A Narrative About War And Freedom: Dialog with the commander Ramush Haradinaj
David Hannay, Cyprus: The Search for a Solution
High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility
Marko Attila Hoare, How Bosnia Armed
Paulin Kola, The Myth of Greater Albania
Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism
David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles
David McKittrick et al, Lost Lives
George Monbiot, Manifesto for a New World Order
Lindsay Moran, Blowing My Cover: My Life As A CIA Spy, and other misadventures
The 9/11 Commission, Report
John Norris, Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo
Matthew Parris, Chance Witness: An Outsider’s Life in Politics
Jeremy Paxman, The Political Animal: An Anatomy
Chris Stephen, Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic
Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, Investing in Prevention: An International Strategy to Manage Risks of Instability and Improve Crisis Reponse
Robert Thomas, The Politics of Serbia in the 1990s
Graham Watson, EU’ve Got Mail
Yugoslav People’s Army, The Truth About the Armed Conflict in Slovenia

History and biography

Dave Barry, Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway
Ciaran Carson, The Star Factory

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LIVE TRUMPS 1.1

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They just turned on the lights on the Eiffel Tower. Fantastic!

Had hoped to go to Macedonia the weekend after next to wander around first world war battlefields, but the organisers of the Vojvodina event I was supposed to go to on the 7th have screwed up, and now it’s on the 6th; so I can’t go. So I think I will do a work-not-pleasure trip, going to Kosovo on the 10th, doing meetings there on the 11th, drive to Montenegro on the 12th, celebrate Montenegro’s independence on the 13th, home on the 14th.

It’s over 40 degrees in Macedonia at the moment anyway, so probably not ideal weather for clambering around the rugged ridges to the north of Lake Doiran. With any luck I will be able to get there in the autumn.

Dear heavens, I have 35 children! And I don’t even know them all!

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I like being less ambiguous but deeper than my parent, .