Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, WeChat, etc

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Update from my previous thoughts:

Threads, the new platform offered by Meta as a rival to Twitter, is now open to these of us in the EU, so I have signed on. Slightly odd to find that I already had 199 followers from the get-go. Very disturbing that the default view on the iOs app is not the accounts you are following but those that the app selects “For You”, which had content that I’m not really in the habit of seeking out routinely. Anyway, I sorted that out, and it now seems much the same as the others to be honest.

So for now I’m going to largely post the same content across Threads, X/Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and sometimes Facebook. Photo-led content will go on Instagram and Facebook first and then probably on the others. Professionally relevant stuff goes on LinkedIn, which is becoming increasingly important as a marketplace of ideas.

Also, when I wake up in the morning I try to remember to post last night’s blog to WeChat, for my 98 followers there, most of whom are asleep by the time I post most of my content. (If you want to add me there, go ahead.)

In a few months I will reassess and see which of them I find worth the effort. To be honest, if I were to drop out of just one of them right now, it would be Mastodon. As previously noted, I can’t find the conversations there that I might like to be in, and in addition, the app on iOs is clunky – rather slow to show me my updated timeline, doesn’t like uploading photos, crashes far too often. Mastodon’s advocates will earnestly assure me that it has been designed that way for Reasons, or that I am just Doing It Wrong. They have a right to their own opinions, but I work the way I do for Reasons too.

Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

She arrived at my quarters still unsettled. The collar of her jacket was slightly askew—none of her Bos were awake to see to her, and she had dressed in nervous haste, dropping things, fumbling at fastenings that should have been simple. I met her standing, and I didn’t dismiss Kalr Five, who lingered, ostensibly busy but hoping to see or hear something interesting.

I wasn’t originally planning to re-read this, but then I thought since I was re-reading the Tiptree and Clarke winners from 2015 I should go and look again at the BSFA winner. I actually voted for it for both the BSFA and the Hugos, and wrote then:

I actually liked it more than the first book in the series; it’s self-contained and fuelled by righteous anger, forensically directed at planetary and sexual politics. It’s several months since I read it as one of the Clarke submissions, but I think I still like it best of the three. [The other two non-Puppy novels being The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison [Sarah Monette], and The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu, which of course won.]

Re-reading it this time, I found the first 20-30% slightly hard going with the density of description of a human society from a slightly non-human perspective; and then the book suddenly catches fire after an act of violence, and the narrator, an artificial intelligence incarnated into a human body, must navigate entrenched societal structures to reach something resembling justice without causing complete disintegration. It’s tremendously tightly done, and took my breath away once again while I was reading it. You can get it here.

There were eight novels on the BSFA Best Novel ballot that year, more than any other year except 2020. The others were Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North, both of which we shortlisted for the Clarke Award; Cuckoo Song, by Frances Hardinge; Lagoon, by Nnedi Okorafor; The Moon King, by Neil Williamson; The Race, by Nina Allan; and Wolves, by Simon Ings. I stand by the decisions we made as the Clarke jury, but there were some very good novels out that year.

On to the Clarke winner, Station Eleven.

Under the Yoke, by Ivan Vazov

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Преди няколко години тая стара ограда се гордееше с исполински бор, който със своята рунтава шапка, дето пееха хиляди птичи гнезда, заслоняваше старовремската черкова. Но бурята катури бора, а игуменът – черковата и съгради нова. Сега тя, със своя висок, по новото зодчество издигнат купол, странно противоречи с осталите стари постройки, паметници на миналото, и даже грози като къс нова хартия, залепена на стар пергамент. Старата черкова и старият бор паднаха под ударите на съдбата и оттогава манастирът затъмня, не весели вече окото с гигантското дърво до облаците; не възвишават благочестиво душата зографисаните по стените образи на светци, архангели, преподобни отци н мъченици с изчовъркани очи от кърджалии и делибашии.Some years before, the old building had rejoiced in a gigantic pine-tree, which sheltered the church with its high- spreading branches—the home of a thousand feathered songsters. But a storm had uprooted the pine and the church tower, and a new tower, which had been erected in its place, with a lofty new-fashioned cupola, made a strange contrast to the dilapidated old remains of a past age: it gave one the same shock that is produced by a piece of fresh white paper stuck on a time-worn parchment. The old church and tower have fallen under the assaults of time and destiny, and henceforth the monastery has become sombre: the eye no longer follows the towering pine to the clouds: the soul no longer draws pious inspirations from the paintings on the walls representing saints, archangels, holy fathers, and martyrs, defiled and with their eyes put out by the Kirjalis and Delibashis.
translated by William Morfill

A classic of nineteenth-century Bulgarian literature, a mercifully short novel about the 1876 uprising against Turkish rule. I must admit that I was surprised by how well it reads, given that I have read any number of much worse-written books about Ireland (or England, or the United States) at the same period. Vazov’s revolutionaries, all men, are outnumbered, outgunned and fight valiantly to the end; his women are in fact also three-dimensional characters; you can’t really say the same for the Turks, and it’s a rather black and white novel, but still it’s a good and digestible insight into that particular part of Europe at that particular time. You can get it here.

This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is a collection of Three Plays by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, but it will have to wait until I have read all the other unread books acquired in 2017.

Tomorrow will be Eleanor of Aquitaine’s 900th birthday

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The most intellectually exciting thing I have ever done, or am ever likely to do in my career, was to discover the likely date of birth of Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right from 1137 to 1204, Queen of France from 1137 to 1152, and then Queen of England from 1154 to 1189 having married and divorced Louis VII of France and then married and survived Henry II of England. She lived until 1 April 1204. Her children included King Richard I (“the Lionheart”) of England and his younger brother King John. The only contemporary image we have of her is from her tombstone; but in popular culture, the dominant image is Katharine Hepburn’s Oscar-winning portrayal of her in the 1968 film The Lion in Winter.

Doing my M Phil thesis in 1991, I was trying to get to grips with a medieval astrological text by one Roger of Hereford, Liber de arte astronomice iudicandi. It’s a hodge-podge of Arabic astrological lore translated into Latin, sometimes well, sometimes less well, and I had great fun identifying the sources that Roger had used. Various clues pointed to the date of writing as being the early to mid 1190s. But then I ran into a problem at the end. There is a worked example of a horoscope, giving precise positions for the planets at a particular time, and then an interpretation of what this horoscope means. It seems to be original text, not copied from other sources like most of the rest of the book. The details given are:

Sun29° Sagittarius
Moon15° Gemini
Venus15° Capricorn
Jupiter20° Cancer
Mars10° Gemini
Mercury20° Sagittarius
Saturn22° Leo
Ascendant15° Libra
Mid-heaven18° Cancer

Now, there is an immediate problem. There is no historical date that fits those planetary positions. But I think that the following assumptions about Roger’s working methods are not unreasonable:

1) The solar position is likely to be the most accurate. This is because the sun’s apparent motion was accurately known, even using the geocentric model in use in the middle ages. The sun passes through the same point of the ecliptic at roughly (to within a day) the same time every year. During the 12th century it passed through 29° Sagittarius on December 14. Roger would have known that the sun could only be at that position on that day.

2) Jupiter and Saturn, the slowest moving planets, will be the most useful for determining the year in question. In this case there is a problem; there is no good fit for Jupiter at 20° Cancer and Saturn at 22° Leo in the historical period. However, Saturn was at 22° Leo in late December 1123, and Jupiter at that time passed through 20° Gemini (next to Cancer) on December 9 and reached 19° Gemini on December 16. If “Cancer” could be a mistake for “Gemini” in the Jupiter position, the horoscope would be consistent for 14 December 1123.

3) Mars provides an extra element of confirmation, having passed through 10° Gemini on December 9 1123, which is close enough given that it’s more difficult to calculate. So we have close matches for Saturn and Mars, and Jupiter precisely one sign out, for 14 December 1123.

4) The positions of the inner planets for 14 December 1123 are wildly discrepant with the positions in our horoscope. However on 14 December 1122, Venus was at 21° Capricorn (having passed through 15° Capricorn on the 9th), Mercury at 14° Sagittarius (having passed through 20° Sagittarius on the 8th) and the Moon at midnight is at 21° Gemini, having passed through 15° Gemini about ten hours earlier.

5) We therefore have the three outer planets fitting 14 December 1123 within a degree of longitude (if the assumption about Jupiter being put in the right degree but the wrong sign is correct), the three inner planets fitting early December 1122 a bit less well, and the Sun fitting both dates.

So, why choose 1123 rather than 1122? It seems to me – having tried it for myself – that the inner planets are much more fiddly to calculate using the available methods, and it is more likely that Roger of Hereford read the wrong line from the algorithm in the more complex process. (Though in my story he got Jupiter wrong too).

One other interesting point is that the distance between Ascendant and Mid-Heaven is too small for this to be a horoscope cast for a British latitude at that time of day and that time of year. The Ascendant is the part of the Zodiac rising on the eastern horizon; the Mid-Heaven is the part of the Zodiac directly due south. The farther from the equator you go, the more the distance between them will vary. The numbers given are consistent with 44° North, with a leeway of about 6°, probably calculated using an astrolabe plate for 45° North. Roger is not know to have worked anywhere other than England, almost all of which is north of 50°.

So, let’s look at what this is supposed to mean. Roger says:

Primum considerarem domini ascendentis, et qui ipse ab angulo recte respicit ascendens. Ab eo inciperem. Primum inspicio a quo separatur. Separatur autem a sole qui est dominus 10m, et est in quarto. Scio igitur per he quod cogitat de aliqua re amata que per quartum signatur vel de patre vel de matre; sed quia luna separatur est a domino 7 qui est domus mulierum id est de matre. Quum vero est in domo vie quod de via mulieris est iuncta mercurio domino vie, in alia domo viarum. Et quum venus coniuncta est iovi in domo regis dico quod ad regem tendit cum ipse etiam sit in exaltatione sua. Sed quum est retrogradus et in oppositione veneris et venus in casu eius, rex non bene eam recipiet. Sed quum est fortuna etiam in exaltatione sua et in angulo celi liber a male postea exaudiet eam. Sed et luna que est recepta ideam signat et est de inimicis, quod virgo est signum humanum et quod est in humano signo, est dominus 12.

Roger’s interpretation of the horoscope that he has just cast is a bit confused and mumbo-jumbo-ish, but like any good soothsayer he starts off by predicting what he already knows to be true: that the inquiry is about a loved one, a parent, a woman, therefore a mother. Then things get interesting. He seems to be saying that this mother is travelling to meet a king, that the king will not give her a good reception, but will give her a hearing afterwards, and that there are enemies involved.

As I said, we know that the most likely date of composition of Roger’s text is in the early to mid 1190s. Why is he casting a horoscope for a date in 1122 or 1123? Who could be the mother going on a journey to meet a king, where she could expect a poor reception but could hope to prevail in the end? Could this be anything other than a horoscope cast for Eleanor of Aquitaine, or some other interested party, to assess the chances of her planned mission to ransom her son Richard I from German captivity in 1193-4, after she raised literally a king’s ransom from the English taxpayer?

It may seem a bit of a stretch, but it’s difficult to imagine another set of circumstances in which a woman (a mother, indeed) born in 1122 or 1123 would be going on a long journey to argue with a king in the 1190s. (If you want to check my working, my M Phil thesis is available in RTF format here. There’s a lot of it that I would write rather differently, thirty-two years on, but I stand by the main conclusion.)

Also, remember the Ascendant/Mid-Heaven calculation that was consistent with 44° North, with a leeway of about 6°? Eleanor was born in Poitiers, whose latitude is 46°35′ North. A lot of other places are in that range, of course. (Though we can probably rule out Minneapolis.)

Scholarly consensus leans more towards 1122 than 1123 for Eleanor’s birth, I must admit, and the case for reading the planetary positions as intended to represent 1122 rather than 1123 is strong. But the very earliest document has her aged 13 in the spring of 1137, when her father died and just before her first marriage, which would mean that she was born between mid 1123 and early 1124; and I’m inclined to believe that the closest report to the event is likely to be the most accurate. There is no document indicating her precise birthday.

So, all in all, I reckon that tomorrow is the 900th birthday of one of my favourite historical characters. Let’s raise a glass of Bordeaux to her. She’d have appreciated it.

I hope that I’ll get the chance to write this up properly some day, to proper rigorous academic standards. I fear it will be a retirement project, almost fifty years after I did the original research. But twelfth-century history is not a terribly fast-moving discipline.

One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Clouds of mosquitoes were tormenting the four passengers already aboard and I hastily applied repellent to my bare parts before passing the bottle around. But it is a fallacy that clothes protect one; soon this swarm was feasting off my thighs and buttocks. Happily Vientiane is not malarial, at least in winter; dengue fever, borne by a soundless daytime mosquito, is more of a hazard. It kills many children and ‘break-bone’ fever debilitates adults for weeks, causing agonising pain; there is neither a prophylactic nor a cure. Perhaps its worst symptom – certainly the most alarming, from the patient’s associates’ point of view – is psychological: dengue violence. A mild-mannered elderly expat told me that while fevered she hit her gardener over the head with a trowel. When she had fully recovered the young man suggested their going to the wat together, to sit in silence in front of the Lord Buddha and be reconciled. In our world, he’d have sued her.

The late great Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy, who I worked with briefly and at long distance back in 1991, travelled around Laos in late 1997 and early 1998, and produced one of her typically empathy-filled accounts of the country and its people, along with the difficulties of getting around on a bicycle. (The title of the book refers to the fact that she injured a foot quite early in the trip, which also hampered her mobility.) It becomes gradually clear that this is a society in deep trauma after the American bombed it to smithereens in an unreported sideshow to the Vietnam War. Murphy generally enjoys and learns from her interactions with the locals; other foreigners are a different matter (to her annoyance, she finds that a fellow passenger on a ferry boat has brought along a copy of one of her earlier books).

Murphy was anti-globalisation and anti-capitalist, and deeply hostile to western interventions in the developing world. That’s not quite where I am coming from, but I really appreciate her candid and unflinching commentary on the consequences, intended or unintended, of economic transition. But I must say that I appreciate even more her description of the glorious landscapes through which she travels, cycling along uncertain roads through the middle of the Laotian mountains. The one thing that the book lacks is a proper map; when I tried to identify some of the spots where she travelled, I was astonished at the distance she covered. I foolishly thought that crossing Bosnia on bombed-out roads in 1997 in our Belfast-bought Skoda was a bit of an adventure, but really there’s no comparison. It’s a fascinating read, and you can get it here.

We got this book because, as a regular Oxfam donor, Anne was invited to Laos in late 2019, twenty-two years on from Dervla Murphy, to see what the NGO money is being spent on. It’s her story to tell, not mine, but they made a promotional video about the trip which features her several times (starting at 0:19, and you can hear her speaking Dutch at 5:06).

This was my top book acquired in 2019. Next on that pile is The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless.

The J.R.R. Tolkien Miscellany, by Robert S. Blackham

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

By the time Tolkien was at Exeter College, he was a committed smoker, mostly smoking a pipe but sometimes cigarettes. Smoking was socially acceptable back then and a lot cheaper than it is today, and Tolkien was most happy when with his fellow students talking and smoking late into the evening.

One of those books of Tolkieniana that I picked up ages ago for a pound on the remainder shelves. Aspects of Tolkien’s life and writing (but mainly his life) are packaged into short, thematic, well-illustrated chapters, though the presentation confusingly alternates between the roughly chronological and the more broadly cultural. There wasn’t much here that was new to me, but it might do for the sort of reader who doesn’t want to tackle Carpenter or one of the other biographies. You can get it here.

This was the shortest book that I had acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Giants at the End of the World, by Johanna Sinisalo.

Sunday reading

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Current
Doctor Who: Wild Blue Yonder, by Mark Morris
Atlas of Irish History, by Ruth Dudley Edwards
Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout

Last books finished
Giants at the End of the World, by Johanna Sinisalo
Doctor Who: The Star Beast, by Gary Russell
Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, by Malcolm Hulke
Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, by Joan Russell Noble
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

Next books
Invasion of the Dinosaurs, by Jon Arnold
Into the Unknown, ed. Laura Clarke
Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle; the Fourteenth Doctor ends. (And the Celestial Toymaker)

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So, unabashed squee from me for the second and third of the Fourteenth Doctor’s three episodes. A real feeling that the grownups are back in charge, wanting to make a show that is fun to watch and accessible, while also being much less shy about its past than it was in 2005. (It was not until Christmas 2006, in Catherine Tate’s first episode, that the word “Gallifrey” was even mentioned.)

I watch Wild Blue Yonder with a couple of fellow fans in the USA last weekend, and was really impressed at taking a fairly simple story (which has been done many times before, including by RTD in what I still think is his best single episode, Midnight) and making it come alive again. It’s rare to have a Doctor Who story that depends so much on the principals, though of course it was first done in The Edge of Destruction in 1964. The special effects show the money that Disney has thrown at it. The Isaac Newton bit was sheer humour, combined with a poke in the eye for bigots by casting a non-white actor in the role, but I don’t see any harm in either of those objectives. And of course lovely and emotional to see Bernard Cribbins again at the end.

The Giggle brought back the Celestial Toymaker, from a story shown in 1966 of which only one episode survived, for a grand confrontation that was suitably climactic. I thought the scenes of the Toymaker creating havoc inside UNIT came close to missing the mark, with comedy violence against women characters and a rather peculiar reference to American Beauty, but otherwise I really loved it.

Catherine Tate got a bit less to do here, apart from a great lost-in-corridors scene, but that’s because we were also introduced to Ncuti Gatwa a bit earlier than most of us had anticipated, with him emerging from David Tennant’s body wearing half his clothes (a gag also used in James Hadley Chase’s Miss Shumway Waves a Wand) and then joining forces with Tennant to defeat the villain – in a simple game of Catch, though that is very well filmed. Neil Patrick Harris was great too; of course real Germans don’t talk anything like that, the whole point is that the shop-keeper aspect of the Toymaker is a fake.

Some sensitive souls have complained that one of the central messages, that people are too often unkind on social media and it would be a bad world if we did this to each other in real life, suggests that it’s wrong to speak your mind frankly. Personally I think it’s reasonable to regret that so much public discourse is polarised these days, and also to acknowledge that RTD has been targeted for grossly unfair online criticism for his Doctor Who work since at least 2005, and you can’t expect that not to sting. I also thought the subtle commentary on television as a force for barbarism was nicely subversive of the very medium we were watching.

The return of UNIT (in a much nicer building than the one that got blown up last year) was not a huge surprise; some were surprised by the return of Bonnie Langford as Mel Bush. I was not. Why not? Because Mel was the only other character present at the final regeneration of Old Who, when the Sixth Doctor was transformed into the Seventh Doctor by BBC internal politics. Having her witness the regeneration from Fourteenth Doctor to Fifteenth Doctor confirms the message that we are saying goodbye to the first era of New Who and moving on to something new.

And I must say that the idea of the Fourteenth Doctor, representing all his predecessors, can settle down to a nice retirement with friends after sixty years, is tremendously moving for those of us who are also closer to sixty than to our youth. Perhaps something got in my eye at the end there. Anyway, I loved it.

Afterwards F and I rewatched the final episode of The Celestial Toymaker. The lore is that The producer of the day (John Wiles) had actually planned to make this what we would now call the first ever regeneration story. The First Doctor spends the second and third episodes invisible as a punishment by the Toymaker (and to accommodate William Hartnell’s holiday schedule); the idea was that when he returned to visibility it would be in a different body. But the BBC higher-ups moved to prevent this, the producer resigned and William Hartnell got another six months in the role.

The episode is manifestly made on a much smaller budget than any 21st century Doctor Who, and the pace is glacial. But the moments of confrontation between Hartnell and Michael Gough, playing the Toymaker, are well done, and the Doctor’s dilemma of how to play the final move in a game that will destroy their pocket universe when it ends is a good plot device (recycled in The Three Doctors and elsewhere). And we have this prophetic exchange at the end:

As Elizabeth Sandifer has written, this is a very problematic story (though see also here), and it was interesting to see it being reinvented in a very different way last night.

It isn’t over for the Fourteenth Doctor as far as this blog is concerned; I have three novelisations and a comic strip to report back on in due course. But that will do for now.

Ancestors in Eastern Connecticut: exploring the graveyards

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As mentioned, I spent last weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, and used the Monday morning to explore four cemeteries in eastern Connecticut where ancestors of mine are buried.

These are all forebears of my great-great-grandfather William Charlton Hibbard, who himself is buried in West Roxbury near Boston. He was born in New Hampshire, as were his parents; his Hibbard grandparents, David Hibbard and Eunice née Talcott, had moved north from Connecticut in the 1770s (perhaps to avoid the war?), but their parents’ graves are all recorded, three of the four in the cemetery at Coventry CT and the fourth at nearby Windham. Earlier Hibbards vanish into the mists, but all four of Eunice’s grandparents seemed also findable; her maternal grandparents also in Coventry, her father’s father in nearby Bolton and her father’s mother (possibly) a bit further away in Windsor.

(Click to embiggen)

Along with my third cousins P and L, who had joined me to find our great-grandparents’ graves last year, and with the estimable Esther as official photographer (so most of the photos below are hers not mine), I set off to track down the last resting places of our forebears.

I rented an electric Kia in Providence on a one-way trip to Logan Airport, and we enjoyed the lovely autumnal drive through southern New England to Windham, where my 5x great grandmother Eliza Hibbard née Leavens is buried.

From the official Hibbard family history

It would have been truly fantastic maybe three or four weeks earlier when the leaves were at full autumnal glory, but as it was, we really weren’t complaining; it was a crisp December day with cheerful sunshine.

Windham cemetery is quite extensive, but the older graves are concentrated near the road. It took me a couple of minutes’ frustrated roaming to remember that there is a photograph of Eliza’s grave on the excellent Findagrave website. She has a very distinctive pentagonal headstone.

The inscription is now obscured by lichen, but it said:
February 13 1762 departed
this life Elizabeth, wife of David
Hebbard, at 38
years of her age

Poor Elizabeth! She was married at 19, and had six children that we know of, three of whom died young; she herself died at 38, and you have to wonder if that was related to yet another pregnancy. Her fourth but oldest surviving child, David, named for his father, was our ancestor. I know nothing about her except the dates of her birth, marriage and death, and the same for her parents, husband and children; nobody who knew her in life has drawn breath since the middle of the nineteenth century; and yet I felt an electric shock of connection as I found her last resting place.

We continued our journey to find the five graves at Coventry, where we converged with P and L, coming in opposite directions from Boston and New Haven respectively. A navigation error (mine) meant that we were the last to arrive, but still in good time for the morning’s plans. The South Street Cemetery, aka the Old South Burying Ground, is much the smallest of the four we visited, and has very few recent graves.

It did not take us long to find Eliza’s husband, our 5x great-grandfather David Hibbard, and his second wife Dorcas née Throop. He lived to 1800, lucky chap, outliving poor Eliza by almost forty years. Dorcas was the same age as Eliza, and David married her less than a year after Eliza’s death; they had three more children who all survived to adulthood and have living descendants, the last born when Dorcas was 43.

Mr David Hibbard died
Auguſt 13th 1800
aged 84 years

In melancholy ſilence here I lay
When Chriſt has call’d my ſoul away
In Gods own arms I left my breath
And O my friends prepare for death

L and P are half-second cousins to each other, sharing a great-grandfather, Thomas Hibbard. He was the older brother of my great-grandfather, Henry Deming Hibbard, so L and P are both third cousins of mine. All three of us are signed up to both Ancestry.com and 23andMe; the two sites disagree about whether I share more DNA with L or with P, but in any case it’s somewhere between 0.6% and 1%. You can judge for yourself if it is visible.

David and Eliza’s son, David junior, married Eunice Talcott, also from Coventry, and they moved up north to the borders of New Hampshire and Vermont, and are buried there. Like David junior, Eunice was named for one of her parents (our 5x great-grandparents); they were Joseph Talcott and Eunice née Lyman, and we found them not far away, next to each other.

Eunice’s headstone (between me and L) reads:

In memory of Mrs. Eunice
Talcott, relict of Capt. Jo-
seph Talcott, who died
August 11th 1813 in the
80th year of her age.

And it is appointed unto
men once to die, but after
this the judgment.

Blessed are the dead,
which die in the Lord

Joseph Talcott fought in the Connecticut militia during the war of independence, and is listed second of the men of Coventry who participated in the first battle of the war, at Lexington in April 1775.

His grave has been adorned with a flag, presumably by local patriots.

This Monument is erected
in memory of Cap. Joſeph
Talcott, who was caſually
Drowned in the Proud Wa-
ters of Scungamug River:
on the 10th Day of June 1789
in ye 62nd Year of his Age.

For man alſo knoweth not his
time, as the fiſhes that are taken in
an evil net, and as the bird that
are caught in the ſnare: ſo are
the ſons of men ſnared in an
evil time, when it falleth sudden-
ly upon them.

The memory of ye juſt is Bleſsed.

We mused about the record of his death, “casually drowned in the proud waters of Scungamug River”. The river is easy; the Skungamaug River, as it is now spelt, runs north to south through Tolland County, in which Coventry is situated. But what does “casually drowned” mean? Are we meant to infer that his death was accidental, or suicide, or something else? A bit of googling suggests that accidental death is intended, but the fact is that this very inscription seems to be the best-recorded use of the phrase. And “proud waters”?

His in-laws, Eunice Talcott née Lyman’s parents, our 6x great-grandparents, are also not too far away in the same cemetery.

Left:
In Memory of Mr
Samuel Lyman
who died Febr ye
4th 1754 in ye 54th
Year of his Age

As You are now
So once were we
As we are now
So You muſt be.

Right:
In Memory of Mrs
Eliſabeth Lyman
ye wife of Mr Samu
Lyman who Died
Febr ye 28th 1751 in
ye 48th year of her
Age

Elizabeth’s maiden name was Smith, which unfortunately makes it very difficult to trace her ancestry further back as there are just too many Smiths around. Her married name, Lyman, became a recurrent first name for boys in the Hibbard family, including my grandmother’s brother, six generations later. (Lyman was also the first name of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wizard of Oz; he never used it, and I have not been able to establish if he was yet another relative, but as it happens my grandmother’s name was Dorothy.)

Benjamin Talcott, Joseph Talcott’s father and therefore another 6x great-grandparent, rests in nearby Quarryville Cemetery in Bolton CT. The cemetery itself is on a rise surrounded by a drive; we parked at the first available opportunity and resigned ourselves to a long search.

But to our surprise we had parked right beside him. His headstone is by far the most dramatic of all of those we saw – it also had the easiest to read inscription, which helped. As usual, it is topped by a rather grotesque winged figure, and has a suitably chilling message.

(Unlike the other pictures here which are either mine or Esther’s, this was taken by L.)

This Monument is
Erected in Memory of
Benjamin Tallcott Esq.
who Departed this Life
on the 9th Day of March
AD 1785 in ye 83d Year
of his Age.

So man Lieth down, and
riſeth not till ye Heavens be no more.

Hark! Death’s Motto from the Silent Tomb
With awful voice Proclaims aloud
Mortals, prepare for you must come
And mingle with the Ghastly Crowd

Interpreting this was a lot of fun. The biblical quote is from Job, but the doggerel appears to be original, or at least the source is not known to Google.

A smaller memorial stone behind the larger one commemorates Benjamin’s service in Captain Rudd’s Company during the French and Indian War (which lasted from 1752 to 1763, so he would have been an elderly Sergeant given that he was born around 1702).

I was charmed by the church steeple a few hundred metres away, and the gables of the nearer farm buildings.

Finally, and a good bit further on, we reached the Palisado cemetery in Windsor, which according to Findagrave.com is the resting place of Benjamin Talcott’s wife Esther, née Lyman, another 6x great-grandparent. (Her daughter-in-law Eunice was also her second cousin twice removed.) This is a huge cemetery, still in use, with an active railway line skirting its boundaries. P took this photo of me and L trying to work out where to find the ancestral Esther, with today’s Esther offering encouragement.

And in fact it was Esther who found Esther.

Unfortunately I’m not convinced that this is the right Esther Talcott. The stone is clearly more recent than 1751, when my 6x great-grandmother died; this Esther rests beside a John H. Talcott, also undated, and a Guy Talcott whose date of death is given as February 28, 1857, aged 78, which is much too late.

Guy Talcott was the son of Daniel Talcott (1744-1824) and Eunice née Moore (1751-1838), distant cousins of our Talcott ancestors, and he had a sister, Esther, and a brother, John (middle initial not otherwise recorded). So I think these are the three Talcotts in Windsor, rather than our direct relatives. Still, it was good that we found the grave we were looking for.

We went for a very decent pub lunch at the Union Street Tavern, and then set off in our separate directions, P dropping Esther back to Providence as I needed to get straight to Logan Airport for my flight. This turned out to be a bit more hair-raising than expected as it took me ages to find out how to charge the electric car, which didn’t quite have enough oomph for the full journey; I eventually sorted it out, and arrived at the departure gate just five minutes before boarding started for my transatlantic flight. Don’t do that, folks, find out how to charge your electric car before driving it. Otherwise it was a good driving experience.

And a good day over all – many thanks to L, P and Esther for being comrades in research. We must do it again some time – I think there are some more graves to be found in a cluster near Worcester, and more again farther north around Littleton NH. In fact I have a photograph from a similar expedition in 1941, when my great-grandfather (right, with beard) and his nephew, P’s grandfather (left) found the graves of David and Eunice Hibbard’s son Lyman and his wife Rebecca there.

Photograph taken by my grandmother’s brother Lyman.

If it’s been done once, it can be done again.

The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Who are you?” I say.

This was joint winner of the Tiptree Award in 2015, along with My Real Children by Jo Walton. It’s set in near-future Asia and Africa, with two different timelines converging on Djibouti from the east (across the ocean) and the west (across the continent). I really liked the two timelines, and was kept guessing until quite near the end as to how they actually meshed together. I was not sure about the ending, where 1) both time lines end up with fatal love triangles and 2) the resolution of the earlier of the two timelines struck me as medically improbable, even with future technology. But I really loved the central images of the two roads, one across the ocean (though why ending in Djibouti rather than Bossasso?) and the other across the Sahel. You can get it here.

The Tiptree honor list also included three other books that I have read, Kaleidoscope, eds Alisa Krasnostein & Julia Rios, Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor and Memory of Water by Emmi Itärantal; three books that I have not read, Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi, The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley and Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett; and four shorter pieces, “In Her Eyes” by Seth Chambers, “The Lightness of the Movement” by Pat MacEwen, “Neither Witch nor Fairy” by Nghi Vo and “A Woman Out of Time”, Kim Curran.

On to Ancillary Sword.

Lovecraft’s Providence

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I spent last weekend at SMOFCon in Providence, Rhode Island, mostly inside the sheltered environment of the Marriott Bonvoy hotel. I did get out for a walk on a damp Sunday morning to attempt the Necronomicon walking tour of sites associated with H.P. Lovecraft in the College Hill district of the city.

The eponymous College Hill, location of Brown University, is edged by a sharp ridge, along which Benefit Street runs from south to north, with a steep drop to the Providence River an the canal to the west. It was easy to imagine tendrils of horrible fog swirling up from below, from the less salubrious parts of the town to trouble the white middle-classes on the higher ground.

135 Benefit Street, supposedly the basis of The Shunned House, “a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side-hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country… that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.”
The home of Henry Anthony Wilcox in The Call of Cthulhu, 7 Thomas Street, “the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America.”

I’m also pretty certain that I took a selfie in front of Lovecraft’s residence at the time of his death, which has been moved from its original address at 64 College Street to 65 Prospect Street; but the picture seems to have been eliminated from my device, probably by some nameless eldritch unearthly power, unprepared to share the image with the human world.

I did take a picture of the sign marking H.P. Lovecraft Memorial Square, which is flanked by an arcane but mangled symbol on a metal plate to the right, and a graphic display of a flashing hand with numbers counting down to the end of time on the other. (Actually the numbers may just be counting down until the traffic lights change; sometimes what you get from these experiences is what you bring to them.)

Lovecraft is of course a tremendously problematic figure, but his descriptive powers are extraordinary, and it was fascinating, though also damp, to walk the streets that had inspired him.

2023 Hugo final ballot – quick take and details

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The Hugo final ballot statistics are out! Though the nominations stats are not yet available.

There were some notably close results:

  • Chris Barkley won Best Fan Writer by *one* vote
  • Zero Gravity Newspaper beat Journey Planet by 8 votes in Best Fanzine
  • Strange Horizons lost to Uncanny Magazine by 18 on the last count for Best Semiprozine, despite having led throughout

The only possible closer vote in the final ballot is a tie, which has happened only once since 1993, when The City & The City and The Windup Girl both won Best Novel in 2010. Between 1953 and 1993 there were ten tied results for the Hugos – two in 1953, one each in 1966, 1968, 1973 and 1974, two again in 1977 and one each in 1989 and 1993. Plus also the Campbell Award in 1974, for a total of twelve. We also had a tie in the 1945 Retro Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) in 2020, which I think is the only tied result for the Retros ever.

Other results this year were much more one-sided, very few going to all stages of the count. Best Short Story (“Rabbit Test”), Best Related Work (the Terry Pratchett biography), and Best Professional Artist (Enzhe Zhao) were all decided on first preferences, and Everything Everywhere All at Once got exactly 50% of the first preferences for Best Related Work (but of course had to got to a second count). Rob Wilkins’ biography of Terry Pratchett got a massive 59.7% of first prefs in Best Related Work.

Camestros Felapton crunched the numbers, and there are only 11 first-count wins on record from this century, five of which were “No Awards” in 2015, and another three were the Lord of the Rings films in 2002, 2003 and 2004. (The other three were Naomi Novik winning the then Campbell Award in 2007, Sarah Webb winning Best Fan Artist in 2014, and “Cat Pictures Please” winning Best Short Story in 2016.)

But we have had them much more often in the Retro Hugos : John W. Campbell for Best Editor (Long) in 1996, 2001, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2019 and 2020, Margaret Brundage for Best Professional Artist in 2020, “Foundation” for Best Novelette in 2018, Fantasia  for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form in 2016, “The War of the Worlds” for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, in 2014, “The Nine Billion Names of God” for Best Short Story in 2004, and three other than John Campbell in 1996 – Animal Farm in Best Novella, “First Contact” in Best Novelette and Bill Rotsler in Best Fan Artist. That’s fifteen in total, twelve this century.

1674 final ballot votes is the lowest since 2010. It is only the third time since my records begin in 1971 that that nomination votes have exceeded final ballot votes; the other two occasions were 2016, which was a side-effect of the Puppy wars, and 1994, when the previous year’s convention made a determined effort to get members to nominate.

“No Award” votes are significantly higher for Best Series than any other category – 12.2% of first preferences (next highest is 7.0% in Fan Artist); 21.2% in the runoff (next highest is 11.1% in Fanzine). I have to say that this confirms me in my view that the problem with the Best Series category is not that it needs various tweaks relating to eligibility, but that it exists in the first place.

Best Novel had the highest participation, 1068 (63.8%); and Best Fancast had the lowest, 572 (34.1%), still comfortably ahead of the old 25% threshold, which has anyway now been abolished – it would have applied this year, but no category was anywhere near the danger zone.

To the details. I note below whenever a result was decided by less than 20 votes. I voted for four of the winners, which is a little more than usual.

Best Novel
Nettle and Bone beat both The Island of Dr Moreau and The Kaiju Preservation Society on the fifth pass; Legends and Lattes then beat The Island of Dr Moreau for second place; The Kaiju Preservation Society beat The Island of Dr Moreau for third place; The Island of Dr Moreau (my own choice) finally won fourth place ahead of The Spare Man, which came fifth with Nona the Ninth sixth.

Best Novella
The Drowned Girls beat both Ogres and Even Though I Knew the End on the fifth pass; Ogres beat Even Though I Knew the End for second place, Even Though I Knew the End came from behind to beat What Moves the Dead by only 19 votes for third place, What Moves the Dead (my own choice) beat Into the Riverlands for fourth place, Into the Riverlands beat A Mirror Mended for fifth place, and A Mirror Mended took sixth.

Best Novelette
“The Space-Time Painter” beat “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” on the sixth count, by 112 votes; “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” beat “A Dream of Electric Mothers” by 15 votes for second place; “A Dream of Electric Mothers” beat “Murder By Pixel: Crime and Responsibility in the Digital Darkness” for third place; “We Built This City” sneaked ahead in a tight field to beat “The Difference Between Love and Time” for fourth place; “Murder by Pixel” (my own choice) beat “The Difference Between Love and Time” for fifth place; and “The Difference Between Love and Time” came sixth.

Best Short Story
As noted above, “Rabbit Test” won on the first count, with “Zhurong on Mars” next but a very long way behind. “D.I.Y.” beat “Resurrection” for second place, “Zhurong on Mars” beat “Resurrection” for third place and finally “Resurrection” beat “The White Cliff” for fourth place. “The White Cliff” beat “Razor’s Edge” for fifth place and “Razor’s Edge” came sixth. For once, I too voted for the winner.

Best Series
Children of Time won a convincing victory on the fourth round, with October Daye, the Scholomance and Rivers of London still in the field. As noted above, this was also the category in which No Award had by far its best performance. Rivers of London beat The Locked Tomb by 16 votes for second place; The Scholomance beat October Daye by 10 votes for third place; The Locked Tomb beat October Daye for fourth place, October Daye beat the Founders Trilogy for fifth place and the Founders Trilogy came sixth, beating No Award by the relatively slim margin of 313 votes to 213. As noted previously, I voted No Award in this category but put Children of Time second.

Best Graphic Story or Comic
Cyberpunk 2077, which I hated but is massively popular in China, won on the third pass with everything except No Award and Once and Future still in the picture. The Dune adaptation beat Saga for second place by 5 votes; Monsters beat Supergirl for third place also by 5 votes; Supergirl (my own choice) beat Saga for fourth place by 17 votes; Once and Future beat Saga by 20 votes for fifth place, and finally Saga, which had been within five votes of taking second place, came sixth.

Best Related Work
As noted above, Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes won a stinking first-round victory with almost 60% of the votes cast. The other placings, in order, with the runner-up for each place winning the next one, and no results particularly close, were Chinese Science Fiction, An Oral History, Volume 1 in second place, Blood, Sweat & Chrome third, Still Just a Geek fourth, Ghost of Workshops Past fifth and the Buffalo World Outreach Project sixth. Here too I voted for the winner.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
As previously noted, Everything Everywhere All at Once got exactly half of the first preference votes and was easily brought over the threshold by the elimination of No Award. The other placings, in order, with the runner-up for each place winning the next one, and only one close result, were: Turning Red second; Nope third; Severance fourth by 8 votes; Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (my own choice) fifth and Avatar: The Way of Water sixth.

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
The Expanse: “Babylon’s Ashes” won on the fourth count with Andor: “One Way Out”, Stranger Things: “Chapter Four: Dear Billy” and She-Hulk: “Whose Show is This?” still in the game. The other placings, in order, with the runner-up for each place winning the next one, and several close results, were: Andor: “One Way Out” second, Stranger Things: “Chapter Four: Dear Billy” third by 19 votes, Andor: Rix Road” fourth by 9 votes, For All Mankind: “Stranger in a Strange Land” (my own choice) fifth by 18 votes, and She-Hulk: “Whose Show is This?” sixth.

Best Editor, Long Form
This only went to five counts, but that was because of a double elimination; Lindsey Hall won a convincing victory over Haijun Yao. The other placings, in order, with the runner-up for each place winning the next one, and only one close result, were: Haijun Yao second, Lee Harris third, Ruoxi Chen fourth by 12 votes, Sarah Peed fifth and Han Yan sixth. I have my doubts about the existence of this category, but it was really very nice to see Lindsey Hall’s joy as she accepted the award on the night.

Best Editor, Short Form
Neil Clarke won on the third count, with Xu Wang, Feng Yang, Sheree Thomas and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki still in the picture. This was one category where Chinese finalists did not get many transfers from non-Chinese finalists. Sheree Thomas beat Xu Wang for second place; Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki beat Scott H. Andrews for third place, after Xu Wang was eliminated by a 5-vote margin on the penultimate count; Scott H. Andrews beat Xu Wang for fourth place; Xu Wang beat Feng Yang by 15 votes for fifth place; and Feng Yang came sixth.

Best Professional Artist
As noted, Enzhe Zhao pulled off a first-round victory, with Alyssa Winans the least far behind of the others. Kuri Huang beat Jian Zhang for second place; Sija Hong beat Alissa Winans for third place; Alyssa Winans beat Jian Zhang for fourth place; Jian Zhang beat Paul Lewin for fifth place; and Paul Lewin came sixth, with none of the results particularly close. I actually found myself chatting to Kuri Huang and Sija Hong on the way to the ceremony, which was nice as I had myself voted for Sija Hong.

Best Semiprozine
Strange Horizons led on all counts except the last, when Uncanny Magazine got enough transfers from FIYAH to win by 18 votes, the only result of the night where the winner did not also have the most first preference votes. Strange Horizons then pulled off a rare first-round victory for second place, with FIYAH the least far behind; FIYAH beat Escape Pod for third place, Escape Pod beat khōréō for fourth place, PodCastle beat khōréō for fifth place and khōréō took sixth place, none of them terribly close.

Best Fanzine
In the first home victory announced on the evening, Zero Gravity Newspaper was nip and tuck with Journey Planet but eventually won by 8 votes. Journey Planet beat Chinese Academic SF Express for second place; Nerds of a Feather beat Chinese Academic SF Express by 11 votes for third place; Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog beat Chinese Academic SF Express for fourth place; and finally Chinese Academic SF Express beat Galactic Journey for fifth place with Galactic Journey coming sixth.

Best Fancast
Hugo, Girl! won an impressive second-round victory on the first count, with Coode Street Podcast next in line. Hugos There, which had actually had the fewest first preferences, took second place ahead of Coode Street Podcast by 13 votes. Coode Street Podcast came third, 19 votes ahead of Octothorpe. Octothorpe beat Worldbuilding for Masochists for fourth place, Worldbuilding for Masochists beat Kalanadi for fifth place and Kalanadi came sixth.

Best Fan Writer
As noted, Chris Barkley beat RiverFlow by just one vote, the closest result of the night and probably of the decade. He had been ahead throughout, and transfers from Arthur Liu were not quite enough to make the difference. RiverFlow beat Arthur Liu for second place; Arthur Liu won a convincing third place with both Bitter Karella and Örjan Westin still in the game; Bitter Karella beat Jason Sanford for fourth place, Jason Sanford beat Örjan Westin for fifth place and Örjan Westin came sixth.

Best Fan Artist
Richard Man (my own choice) won on the fifth round, with Iain Clark and Laya Rose still in. The other placings, in order, with the runner-up for each place winning the next one, and no close results, were Iain Clark second, Lara Rose third, Alison Scott fourth, España Sherriff fifth, and Orion Smith sixth.

Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book
Akata Woman won a fifth-round victory with The Golden Enclaves and Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods still in the game. The Golden Enclaves beat Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods for second place; Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak beat The Serpent’s Wake for third place; The Serpent’s Wake beat Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods for fourth place; and Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods (my own choice) finally beat Bloodmarked for fifth place, with Bloodmarked coming sixth.

Astounding Award for Best New Writer
Travis Baldree was close to a first round victory and clinched it on the second round, with Isabel J. Kim the least far behind. Isabel J. Kim (my own choice) came from behind to beat Everina Maxwell by 17 votes for second place, narrowly avoiding elimination in favour of Maijia Liu by 2 votes in the penultimate round. Everina Maxwell beat Maijia Liu for third place, Maijia Liu beat Naseem Jamnia for fourth place, Naseem Janina beat Weimu Xin by 7 votes for fifth place and Weimu Xin got sixth place. Personally I thought Weimu Xin’s stories were excellent, but they were only made available in Chinese, and I fear that not many non-Chinese voters will have bothered to run them through the translation sites.

Looking forward to seeing the nomination statistics.

Sunday reading

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Current
Giants at the End of the World, by Johanna Sinisalo
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

Last books finished
Under the Yoke, by Ivan Vazov
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton
Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro
Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Facing Fate: The Good Companion, by Nick Abadzis et al

Next books
Doctor Who: The Star Beast, by Gary Russell
Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, by Joan Russell Noble
Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

William of Ireland

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A week ago I was working (and staying) next to Charing Cross in London, and found myself exploring the intellectual rabbit hole of the Eleanor Crosses. To refresh your memory, when Eleanor of Castile, the wife of King Edward I of England, died in 1290, her grieving husband erected large memorial crosses at every point where her funeral procession had rested overnight en route from Nottinghamshire, where she died, to Westminster Abbey, where she was buried. There were originally twelve of these, the last one at the top of Whitehall on what is now Trafalgar Square, in an area then known as Charing. Outside Charing Cross station there is an ornate Victorian re-imagining of what the original cross might have looked like, and I guess I have been familiar with that since I started going to London on my own.

Only three of the original crosses survive, in Geddington and Hardingstone in Northamptonshire and Waltham Cross in Hertfrodshire. The royal accounts for the 1290s also survive, and so we know the names (if little more) of the craftsmen who built them. My eye was caught by one name in particular: “William of Ireland”. He provided the sculptures of Queen Eleanor for the crosses in Lincoln and Hardingstone, and the latter survive. He was paid 5 marks per figure (difficult to equate but around £3000 in today’s money). I find them striking.

Photograph from Bob Speel’s website, 2014

William of Ireland must be the earliest Irish artist whose name is known to us. (The earliest known Irish painter is Garret Morphy, who died around 1716.) None of William’s other work survives, as far as we know. But these four graceful figures are quite special. Northamptonshire is not on my usual circuit (I did work in Raunds for two months in 1985) but I would make a substantial detour to go and see this.

Carsten Dilba has apparently taken the study of William of Ireland as far as it can go in his 2009 book Memoria Reginae, but it is difficult to find, and in German. Oddly enough he is one of the sculptors celebrated on the Frieze of Parnassus around the base of the Albert Memorial, itself based on the Eleanor Crosses (one of which features behind him). Of course, John Birnie Philip, who did that bit of the frieze, can have had no idea at all of what William of Ireland actually looked like.

 detail from a photo by David Iliff. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

In a 1925 article in the English Dominicans’ Blackfriars magazine (“A Causeway and a Cross”, Frank Byrne waxes lyrical about him:

I wonder if William of Ireland, artist in stone and marble, ever gave it a thought that some of his sculptures might resist the ravages of time to such an extent that they would still be standing, objects for admiration, well over six hundred years after they had left his hands ! I wonder if this Irish craftsman, as in the fading years of the thirteenth century he worked with chisel and mallet fashioning the lineaments of the deceased wife of Edward I, King of England, ever dwelt on the possibility that in centuries to come there might be people who, while admiring the work of his hands, would inwardly wonder what manner of man he himself had been, and why in his own day he was sometimes styled ‘ The Imaginator.’

William of Ireland ! There is something that pleases the ear and intrigues the mind in the sound of his name. It possesses a touch of regal grandeur, or suggests ecclesiastical authority of no mean order. Yet he was a sculptor, a craftsman in stone; but undoubtedly a craftsman whose capabilities were known and appreciated. The cross as a whole was designed and carried out by John de Bello, or de la Battaille, and he, with John Pabenham, was responsible for its erection; but William of Ireland appears to have had separate contracts for the statues and the head of the cross. In the Accounts of Queen Eleanor’s Executors, where he is occasionally shown as receiving something in part payment and in settlement of his account for the statues, the shaft, the head and the ring of the cross, he is diversely designated ‘ William of Ireland,’ ‘Master William of Ireland,’ or ‘ William of Ireland, the Imaginator.’

[…]

What was it that stirred the soul of this Irish sculptor as he fashioned those works of classic beauty? Surely not merely his genius or his admiration for the departed consort of the King of England? To me the statues seem to betoken some deeper motive than either of these, and the remark recently made by a little child strengthened an opinion on the matter which was, and still is, at the back of my mind.

On the last occasion I visited Queen Eleanor’s cross I was accompanied by a little girl, a child of six years of age. After I had silently studied it once more we came away. As we did so, I casually asked this little one what she thought of it. She was very dubious. She thought it very old, and dirty, and that it wanted a good clean; but, brightening up, she added : But I liked the statues of Our Lady very much. They were very nice ! ‘

I think that if the truth were really known, William of Ireland was not only a sculptor of great ability, but was also a deeply religious man. This it was that fired his imagination and stirred his artistic soul. Having, in all probability, executed figures representing Our Divine Lord hanging on the Cross, with Our Blessed Lady and St. John standing by His side as the terminating adornment of the whole memorial, he proceeded for the next stage to carve statues in keeping with the figures above. For this purpose he used the form of Queen Eleanor as his model and glorified it in his work. Hence the delightfully sweet expression, the gracious dignity, the captivating benignity, and the exquisitely virginal pose.

Conjectural? Quite. Far-fetched? Possibly. Yet think again—and again ! It might at least account for the soubriquet that appears to have been bestowed upon William of Ireland by someone—perhaps playfully, or sarcastically, or jealously—’ The Imaginator.’

I regret to say that a subsequent issue of Blackfriars carried a letter from an anonymous correspondent:

‘ There was an English family of de Ireland, later Ireland, supposed to trace back to Lancashire ; but a Thomas de Ireland was a witness to a Yorkshire deed in 1284. As a place name, the Imperial Gazetteer of 1872 gives Ireland a hamlet in the parish of Southills, Bedfordshire. There may have been other places of the name amongst the thousands of forgotten places; but one is enough to refute the assertion that William of (de) Ireland was Irish.’

Wikipedia (for what that is worth) tells me that the “Ireland” in Bedfordshire was known as “Inlonde” in the 16th century. One of the Jesuits who was lynched for the Popish Plot in 1679 is recorded in some sources as “William of Ireland”, but more often just as “William Ireland” and his real name may have been Iremonger. It seems to me rather unseemly that in 1925 someone felt compelled to desperately grasp for other possible origins than the island of Ireland for a sculptor who produced a lovely portrait of an English queen.

A postscript: I wrote this last weekend, and on Tuesday I had lunch with an old friend, visiting Brussels, who lives within five minutes walk of the Hardingstone cross; to make the coincidence even better, as it happens, my friend is Irish – but his name is not William.

All Things Made New, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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Second paragraph of third chapter (“The Virgin Mary and Protestant Reformers”):

The scandal of Cranmer on the Lady altar tells us a good deal about the ambiguous feelings of the Reformers for Our Lady. On the one hand they saw it as a major work of piety to demolish and demystify the cultic and devotional world of which she was the centrepiece. On the other, they needed her as a bastion to defend the Catholic faith against the more militant forces which the Reformation had unleashed. They wished her to play her part in the biblical narrative which they were proclaiming to the world, and which they felt was threatened from the two opposed forces of papistry and radicalism. But in the ambiguity of their feelings towards Mary, they were being true to what they found in the biblical text: here was a story of Mary which not only was restricted in scope but also contained elements of both praise and reserve. The Reformers’ task was one of restoration as much as destruction.

I hugely enjoyed MacCulloch’s massive History of Christianity when I read it in 2012; this is a shorter collection of essays on different aspects of the Reformation. I found most of it very interesting, though I must admit I had not heard of Richard Hooker and am little the wiser now. But in general, it’s a set of pleas for English Reformation history to be understood as a specifically English historical experience, but also one that was linked to developments on the European continent and which also had reverberations in America. (I wish there had been more on Scotland and Ireland, or indeed Wales, but this is a collection of pieces mainly published elsewhere so it’s unreasonable to expect global coverage.)

MacCulloch comes back to the question of English religious texts several times, and explains why on the one hand the King James Version (and he unpacks that name) is used for most of the Anglican services, but on the other the Psalms are generally Myles Coverdale’s version. There’s also an interesting short piece on the Bay Psalm Book, the first book in English known to have been published in America (in Boston, in 1640). I like that sort of thing myself, though of course we have to be aware that we tend to focus on the artefacts that survive from history which can lead to a lack of perspective on less tangible things.

Anyway, apart from Hooker I enjoyed this and learned from it, and you can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2017. Next on that pile is Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, ed. Joan Russell Noble.

November 2023 books

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Travel this month: Oslo, Paris, London, and tonight in Natick, MA, via Copenhagen.

Non-fiction 8 (YTD 79)
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost
The Hand of Fear, by Simon Bucher-Jones
Dalek, by Billy Sequire
All Things Made New, by Diarmaid MacCulloch
The J.R.R. Tolkien Miscellany, by Robert S. Blackham
One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy 
The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton
Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro

Non-genre 2 (YTD 27)
The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope
Under the Yoke, by Ivan Vazov

SF 5 (YTD 159)
The Road to Amber, by Roger Zelazny
My Real Children, by Jo Walton 
The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

Doctor Who 4 (YTD 32)
Doctor Who and the Androids of Tara, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara, by David Fisher
Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, by Terrance Dicks
Doctor Who: Dalek, by Rob Shearman

Comics 2 (YTD 26)
Facing Fate: Vortex Butterflies, by Nick Abadzis et al
Eldrad Must Live! by Bob Baker, Stephen B. Scott,  Andrew Orton and Colin Brockhurst

4,400 pages (YTD 82,000)
7/21 (YTD 141/330) by non-male writers (Murphy, Norton, Castro, Walton, Byrne, Leckie, illustrators of Vortex Butterflies)
None (YTD 42/330) by a non-white writer
9 rereads (The Prisoner of Zenda, My Real Children, The Girl in the Road, Ancillary Sword, The Metamorphosis, Doctor Who and the Androids of Tara, Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara, Doctor Who and the Hand of Fear, Doctor Who: Dalek)

338 books currently tagged unread – down 6 from last month.

Reading now
None – typing this up just after I finished The Metamorphosis on the plane.

Coming soon (perhaps)
Facing Fate: The Good Companion, by Nick Abadzis et al
Doctor Who: The Star Beast, by Gary Russell
Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion, by Terrance Dicks
Invasion of the Dinosaurs, by Jon Arnold
The Haunting of the Villa Diodati, by Philip Purser-Hallard
Giants at the End of the World, by Johanna Sinisalo
Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, by Joan Russell Noble
Atlas of Irish History, by Ruth Dudley Edwards
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
Jaren van de olifant, by Willy Linthout
Marking Time, by Elizabeth Jane Howard
A Long Day in Lychford, by Paul Cornell
The New Machiavelli, by H. G. Wells
Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez
Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse
Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North
Land of the Blind, by Scott Gray et al
Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne
How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
The Pragmatic Programmer, by David Thomas
“Georgia On My Mind”, by Charles Sheffield
Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless
The Unsettled Dust, by Robert Aickman
Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak

My Real Children, by Jo Walton

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

In due course Oswald left his minor public school at seventeen, and went straight into the RAF, where he ended up in Bomber Command. He was killed in the autumn of 1943 flying a raid over Germany. Patty went home to Twickenham that Christmas, all heartiness and perpetual appetite, in the middle of a late growth spurt. She found her mother trying to be proud of her heroic son but succeeding only in being desolate. Her father looked ten years older. She knew she was no compensation to them for Oswald’s loss, and did not try. Her own loss was constantly with her.

A novel of a woman whose life bifurcates when she accepts – or rejects – her boyfriend’s marriage proposal in the 1940s; we follow her through two different timelines of England (mostly) in the late twentieth century, with neither timeline being the same as ours – one is a little more hopeful, with colonies on the moon; one less so, with war and conflict. I enjoyed it and was moved by it, but not as much as by Walton’s previous Among Others. I found the biographical details of the main character’s parallel lives a bit staccato in places, especially towards the end, and I wasn’t at all convinced that her early decision was a plausible jonbar point for the two histories – though that appears to be the point of the story. However the depiction of how differently family dynamics can play out under varied circumstances is compassionate and convincing.

It was one of the novels submitted for that year’s Clarke Award, when I was one of the judges, but in the end we didn’t even shortlist it. It did, however, jointly win the Tiptree Award (along with The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne), and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and a bunch of others. You can get it here.

The Road to Amber, by Roger Zelazny; and the story behind “Manna from Heaven”

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Second paragraph of third story, “Come Back to the Killing Ground, Alice, My Love” (as presented in this collection; in earlier publication this text is merged with the previous and following sentences to form a longer first paragraph)

At first I didn’t recognize her. And when I did I knew it still couldn’t be right, her, there, with her blindfolded companion in the sandals and dark kimono. She was dead, the octad broken. There couldn’t be another. Certain misgivings arose concerning this one. But I had no choice. Does one ever? There are things to do. Soon she will move. I will taste their spirits.

I complained last month that I had already read all of the stories in the fifth volume of the collected Roger Zelazny. More of the material in this final volume seemed new to me; it starts with an adaptation of the Grimm tale Godfather Death, which Zelazny also turned into a musical (never staged); the final Amber stories are here, but so also is some background writing about Amber which was not widely available in his lifetime; and there are some non-fiction pieces about his concept of his own craft, as well as emotional reminiscences about Zelazny the man and mentor, from friends and family. It’s a thoroughly satisfactory capstone to the five volumes that went before.

I am very glad to report that NESFA, the publishers, have just released all six volumes in epub and mobi format. I was happy to spend quite a lot for the hard copies, with the gorgeous Michael Whelan wraparound cover, but for a lot of fans $9.95 for the electronic version makes more sense. But if you want to, you can get the six volumes here, here, here, here, here and here.

The majority of the sort fiction here was previously published in the 2003 collection Manna from Heaven, which I read in 2005 and was underwhelmed by. A commenter on my original Livejournal post had this to say:

Manna from Heavan is a piece of trash…

There are very good reasons why you were *underwhelmed* by the book. One of the big collectors Scott Zrubek, (laughingly misspelled in book) bought the rights to print Roger’s short-stories and had a Pre-determined list for inclusions. Then he asked for suggestions on story inclusions, then ignored them all and did exactly what he wanted to, its what I call *hardheaded*. He also had a pre-determined name for the book, his favorite story Mana from Heaven, but the estate said that name cannot be used for legal reasons, so again with a hardhead, he changed the Mana to Manna simply so he could keep his original title. But the crowning mis-achievement is that despite offers of financial backing (ahem… me!) he proceeded to use a friend of his to actually produce the book, and all the hype about a wonderfully bound, high-quality acid-free paper with smythe-sewn binding, etc, etc, became a total piece of well…. the paper couldnt be any cheaper, the binding couldnt be any cheaper, the boards warp over time, etc. etc. etc. as his *friend* gave the printing to the cheapest bid and the book was printed in TAIWAN. His friend went for the bucks of profit and the book went to the dogs.
Just thought you might want to know what happens when *one* man and *his* friend decide to ignore all reason and requests and produce an item on their own as a lasting legacy to someone HA HA HA….

This provoked a response from a Livejournal user using the handle “madmoravian”, who from context must be Scott Zrubek:

Unfortunately, some of what you say is true and some of what you say is completely unknown to me.

My goal with the book was to get stories that had not seen the light of day back before the public’s eye. The stories I could get my hands on (there are some stories of which I have no copies) were not all of the ones I wanted to publish. Also, because of space reasons for a commercially viable book, a number of stories are sitting on the editing floor. Calling me “hardheaded” is, to me, a bit callous, considering the struggle I had deciding which ones went in and which ones were left out and which ones I had access to.

Someone had to make the final call and, since I’d paid for the rights, I figured it should be me. I put 6 years of my life into the book and quite a bit of money. I’m pleased with the way it turned out, but not overjoyed. Could it have been better? Absolutely. There are a number of things that occurred during the process that I would love to be able to change. Alas, ’tis not to be.

My favorite story of the book is not “Mana from Heaven”. Probably “Blue Horse, Dancing Mountain” is. I thought that title to be an appropriate one for the entire book, with either spelling of mana/manna. I don’t know whether I came up with that for the title of the book, or if one of the other two folks involved did.

I’d be interested to know who you are. Granted, this occurred a long time ago, and I could be forgetting facts, but I don’t remember offers of financial backing from anyone. Financial backing was not the only consideration, there had to be a way to get the book out and distributed. The method that actually occurred pretty much fell flat on its face, but it looked good at the beginning.

I personally don’t believe that I ignored all reason and requests. I ignored some reason and was not able to fulfill some requests, but that is life as a human being, is it not?

I know nothing more.

The Road to Amber was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Giants at the End of the World, edited by Johanna Sinisalo, the 2017 WorldCon anthology.

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Before all of these looms Adventure, Warren Robinett’s second game for Atari. (His first, Slot Racers, was a combat racing game in which each player navigated a rudimentary slot car through a maze, attempting to fire a bazooka and hit the opposing player’s car.) Robinett was the first Atari employee who had a degree in computer science, which may have had something to do with his visiting the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and encountering another kind of maze there – one that would inspire the cartridge he created. The game he devised was not at all obvious at the time, but it would manage to establish the basic conventions of the graphical adventure.

I know very little about computer games, and still less about the early history of the Atari system; but sometimes it does you good to read about a field of human endeavour with which you are completely unfamiliar. This is a tremendous analysis of how coding is affected by external factors, especially the way in which the business of game development is financed and structured, but also from learning about player preferences and making crazy bets about game features which turn out to pay off (or not).

This slim volume looks in depth at six games, only one of which I had heard of – Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, but also in passing at the other games developed before or at the same time in each case, to paint a picture of the intellectual moment in which the writing of the game took place. There is a modest amount of machine code, but a lot of analysis of how ideas get turned into player experience. I don’t think I have retained very much of the information, but I come away struck by the cultural profundity of the whole enterprise. Recommended even for those like me who are not immersed in the subject. You can get it here.

This was my top book acquired in 2019 which is not by H.G. Wells. Next on that pile is The Lost Puzzler, by Eyal Kless.

Sunday reading

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Current
Under the Yoke, by Ivan Vazov
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie
The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton

Last books finished
The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne
The J.R.R. Tolkien Miscellany, by Robert S. Blackham
One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy 

Next books
Many Grains of Sand, by Liz Castro
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

Doctor Who: The Star Beast

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This afternoon I hunted down my very dusty copy of The Iron Legion and refamiliarised myself with the story of Beep the Meep, as originally told in 1980. Reaction on social media ranged from “That’s an impressive artistic team” to “I spent 12p out of my 50p pocket money on that”.

It a great story, with the first ever non-white companion becoming part of the Doctor’s adventures. I was not living in the UK when it was first published in the spring of 1980, but I must have caught up with it pretty soon, at the latest when it was republished in 1984. So I’ve been wondering how Beep the Meep could be put on screen for almost forty years. I was glad to see about 60% of it transferred to tonight’s story.

Stunned to see just how much you would need to pay for a second-hand copy of The Iron Legion, but you can try and get one here.

I also had a listen while out at the shops a bit later to the 2002 Big Finish audio The Ratings War, by Steve Lyons, which brings back Beep the Meep as a sinister broadcasting magnate and has a lot of sly references to the state of Doctor Who at the time, delivered pointedly by Colin Baker. The central theme was used for a couple of TV Ninth Doctor stories a couple of years later, but it’s still worth a listen to get a sense of where things were at the time, and it’s actually available for free from Big Finish here.

So, wasn’t tonight’s episode brilliant? Tennant and Tate back on form, resolving some of the dangling plot points from 2010, incorporating almost all of the good bits from the 1980 comic strip, and with some suitable reflections on who the Doctor is, and what it means to be human in all our forms. (The coffee bit at the end was just a bit silly, but I forgive it, just because). I’m really hopeful for a new surge of consistent quality for the next two weeks, and beyond. The music was good too. But yeah, I loved it.

Edited to add: Just watched the behind the scenes video. Real lump in the throat to see Dave Gibbons and Pat Mills reacting to a 40-year-old story hitting the screen.

Doom’s Day: 24 Doctor Who stories in different media, of which less than half feature the Doctor

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For the 60th anniversary, we have been given a slightly weird thing: a 24-part story featuring a time-travelling assassin called Doom, in which the Doctor figures only occasionally, told across various media with, frankly, varying degrees of success. The two big problems are that murder isn’t actually all that funny a topic, so it’s awkward to find the tone for a set of funny stories about assassination; and that Doom actually isn’t a very good assassin, in that all of her missions seem to end in failure.

Hour One, by James Goss (online story) – third paragraph:

“I’m dying.”

As my regular reader knows, I’m normally a huge fan of James Goss’s writing, but I’m afraid that this first chapter made very little sense to me. You can read it here for free.

Four Hours of Doom’s Day, by Jacqueline Rayner, art by Russ Leach, Mike Summers and Roger Langridge (comic strip supplement to DWM #592) – second frame of third story:

Again, I normally enjoy Jacqueline Rayner’s prose, and again, I felt that this was far too rushed; the four stories have only 16 pages between them, and the first has only two. We get an appearance from the Sixth Doctor, and separately we also get Jo Grant, River Song, Cybermen and Nestenes. But there’s really not much there.

A Doctor in the House? by Jody Houser, art by Roberta Ingranata, Warnia K. Sahadewa, Richard Starkings & Jimmy Betancourt (Titan comics) – second frame of third story:

Given a bit more space to breathe in – 64 pages across the four stories – I enjoyed this much more; also there’s a nice consistency in that Missy appears in each of the four, creating a fun dynamic with our heroine, and the Twelfth Doctor turns up in the last of them. It’s not yet out as a single volume but you can get the two issues here and here.

AI am the Doctor, by Mario M. Mentasti (video game)

I downloaded the Lost in Time videogame purely so that I could get to this installment of the Doom’s Day story. It is an exceptionally dull game, where you don’t have to do much except poke at the screen to score points, interrupted by occasional bits of plot. If you play the game for long enough, you get to the two Doom-related bits. I poked my way through to the first of these, realised that I had not absorbed any of the plot, closed the game down and have not started it up again.

Extraction Point, by M.G. Harris (novel) – second paragraph of third section:

Huh, cave art. Didn’t expect that.

Four more stories in which the Ninth Doctor appears briefly in the first and the Second Doctor plays a larger role in the last. (There is a confusing misprint on page 220: “The Doctor was already lowering herself into the elevator” which from context should clearly be “himself”.) It’s Harris’s first contribution to Who, and as with some of the other Doom’s Day components I found it a bit rushed. Still, interesting use of shape-changing aliens – the Kraals and Slitheen do have that in common. You can get it here.

Wrong Place at the Right Time, by Garner Haines (video game)

As mentioned above, I lost patience with the Lost in Time game, which this is part of, and did not get to this bit.

Four from Doom’s Day, by Darren Jones (audiobooks)

Four more stories, of which my favourite was the first, read by Sooz Kempener (who also reads the last of the four) and involving Ian and Barbara on a Mediterranean cruise. The Twelfth Doctor shows up in the last of them. You can get them here.

Dying Hours, by Jacqueline Rayner, Robert Valentine, Simon Clark and Lizzie Hopley (Big Finish audio plays)

These are the only parts of Doom’s Day that actually feature actor Sooz Kempener in the title role, along with Becky Wright as her controller Terri. Probably each of the audio plays took more combined creative effort from all the the professionals involved than any of the other segments, and it certainly pays off; you can’t rush an hour-long story with real actors into two pages of text. Even so, the four plays have various levels of success; the one that worked best for me was the last, The Crowd by Lizzie Hopley, which brings Doom into contact with the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard (a welcome return from India Fisher) at the scene of the murder of Thomas Becket. You can get it here.

Out of Time, by James Goss (online story – third paragraph:

The Doctor.

Actually this is short, funny and to the point; the First Doctor shows up and sorts everything out, though in such a way that, once you pause for thought, you slightly wonder if it all really mattered that much in the first place. You can read it for free here.

And finally, there’s a game called Doom’s Minute on the BBC website. It took me a while to work out how to play it, and it’s not all that exciting, but you can play it here.

I can see why the BBC decided to try and do a multiplatform story – it’s a good idea to try and draw those who may not have been into all of the available varieties of media together. Sooz Kempener is a great performer and it’s a shame that we only actually get her in the audio plays towards the end. But this honestly felt rather rushed in places; the bits that worked best for me – the Big Finish audios and the Titan comics – were probably the ones that took the most energy and creativity, and it shows.

Dalek, by Billy Seguire (and Robert Shearman)

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Happy 60th birthday, Doctor Who! This week, I’ve been blogging Doctor Who books, and here’s another one.

The first New Who episode with a Dalek was shown the Saturday before the 2005 UK election; I was blogging a lot about New Who at the time, and celebrated the Radio Times cover:

I hugely enjoyed the actual episode:

That was excellent. An existential Dalek, no less! The back-story of the Time War comes into clearer focus. The mutant inside was, as put it, “suitably squamous and rugose, not to mention dripping with mucus”. The three-way relationship between the Doctor, Rose and the Dalek. (Oh yeah, and Adam. Who is a bit pretty.)

I’ve watched it a couple of times since, including the lockdown group watch in 2020, and enjoyed it every time.

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/1255921442488754183

Coming back to it now, I felt that Corey Johnson as Van Statten is perhaps a little underwhelming, but the rest is still great. We know a bit more now about Eccleston’s personal demons, and it deepens my appreciation of his performance.

The second sentence of the third chapter of Robert Shearman’s novelisation of his own story is:

It might be thought that they had been paired deliberately as comic contrast. But they hadn’t. Van Statten didn’t have that sort of sense of humour. And now as he swept into the Cage operations room, they both snapped to attention and saluted. They knew that their boss wouldn’t acknowledge them, that he probably wouldn’t even notice they were there – but it was the correct form of the thing. If they were surprised that he’d brought the intruder with them they didn’t show it. They were paid not to be surprised.

When I first read it two years ago, I wrote:

Great novelisation of one of the great New Who episodes. You have seen the show, here’s the writer’s cut, as it were, giving new background to a number of the characters, smoothing out a couple of plot kinks, with combination of tight-third for Rose interspersed with notes from the omniscient narrator explaining what was happening. We lose a couple of the good lines (“He’s a bit pretty” / “I hadn’t noticed”) but we get a lot more in other areas. Well worth adding to the collection. You can get it here.

Coming to it again just after rewatching the TV episode, I noticed several significant points that I should have remarked on first time around. Goddard is actually an FBI plant, and takes over operations from Van Statten a bit earlier (which makes sense). We get a lot more about everyone’s background, including the security guards. Adam’s personal weapons cache has been built up by him in case he might need to shoot his way out. It’s very satisfactory.

I am in a mood of tracing roots of stories at the moment, so I listened again to Shearman’s earlier Big Finish play, Jubilee, which is credited on screen as the basis for Dalek. It was the 40th Big Finish audio, produced in time for the 40th anniversary of the show in 2003. When I first listened to it in 2007, I wrote:

Jubilee was of course the basis for the superb Ninth Doctor story Dalek. I was surprised, though, by how different it was. There are similarities – the first confrontation between Doctor and imprisoned Dalek, the relationship between Dalek and companion (done more convincingly on TV), the Dalek’s quest for orders (done more convincingly here); but there is a huge difference in setting, the audio play taking place in an alternate 2003 where the world is ruled from London by the villainous Mr and Mrs Martin Jarvis, thanks to the Doctor’s intervention a hundred years earlier. And yet this doesn’t fall into the category of Doctor-returns-to-the-scene-of-a-previous-adventure stories, because the earlier Sixth Doctor is still there. It’s a good one, but the TV version is I think better (not always the case; see Spare Parts).

I confess that on this listening I didn’t feel that it worked as well. The two core moments – when first the Doctor and then his companion meet the imprisoned Dalek – are both very good and ended up much less changed for the TV story. The first half is fine, as we get dug into the horror of an parallel timeline where the UK’s dictatorship maintains its position by whipping up fear of the Daleks; but I felt it lost the run of itself at the end, with too many cases of characters revealing that their real motivations are completely different to what we had been told; and I did not feel that all the plot strings were tied up. There is some great humour – especially the opening sequence which parodies the whole concept of Doctor Who – but some dark shifts of tone which seemed to me dissonant rather than masterful. It’s probably fair to say that fannish expectations were different back in 2003, when it looked like the Wilderness Years would last for ever. You can get it here.

Billy Seguire has delivered an excellent analysis of the story and everything around it in this Black Archive. It has nine chapters and an interview with Robert Shearman, so I’m afraid I will run through them fairly quickly, while still recommending the book to the interested reader.

The first chapter, “‘And Now I Know Your Name’”, looks at the significance of the epsiode’s one-word title and the way in which Daleks can be named; the Dalek of the episode is referred to subsequently as “Metaltron”.

The second chapter, “The Myth of the Great Curator”, looks at museums in Doctor Who; there are plenty of them.

The third chapter, “‘That’s What They Called It the Last Time’”, looks at the evolution of the story from Jubilee to the TV story and then to the novel. Its (long) second paragraph is:

Words like ‘adaptation’, ‘remake’, and ‘reboot’ are all used to describe a work that is drawing on a past version of itself. ‘Drawing’ is a loaded word in this context, one which can apply either to what an adaptation takes, as in drawing water from a well, or what it defaces, such as drawing a shape on a blackboard. Both meanings apply to the concept of adaptation through the way the past and future versions interact. In the case of Jubilee, becoming ‘the story that became Dalek’ breaks it down to those elements which were carried forward and removes contextual factors like the anniversary nature of the story, or public perception of the sixth Doctor, from consideration. In a sense, this applies to any progression of history. Our present circumstances come into play when interpreting the past in a way that wouldn’t have applied to contemporary analysis. History requires perspective. Yet adaptations are unique in that they allow us to bridge, and affect our understanding of, two distinct periods through direct contrast. There’s a continuing presence of the original in an adaptation that links it to the past work. There is also a way in which the original is now affected. When someone says that a revived work ‘ruined their childhood’, what they really mean is that the new work has infiltrated their perception of the original, that the elements that made it work were removed. This is particularly true in ongoing works, such as the Star Wars franchise, where new entries are made to fit into various states of canon or validity. An adaptation is different from a sequel because they tell the same story. Some elements are bound to contradict, meaning whichever version becomes the prime text often directly overwrites the original.

The fourth chapter, “‘And When I Close My Eyes’”, looks at the story as a portrayalof consflict-related trauma in the context of Abu Ghraib and the conflicts of the early 21st century.

The fifth chapter, “‘And You Made Me Better’”, looks at the character of Rose as a transformative agent for the Doctor (and the Dalek).

The sixth chapter, “Who Owns the Internet?”, looks at the portrayal of the online world in the story, which came just before the growth of social media. (Van Statten’s original name was “Will Fences”, but this is obviously too close to Bill Gates.)

The seventh chapter, “The Dalek Surprise Party”, looks at how Joe Ahearne’s direction and Murray Gold’s music maintain our attention.

The eighth and longest chapter, “In the Absence of God”, makes a convincing case that the Daleks tell us something important about religion and belief. A couple of previous Black Archives have made the mistake of banging on about theology too much, and this seems to me much better-judged.

The ninth chapter, “‘Why Don’t You Just Die?’”, looks at the tricky topic of how suicide is (and can be) portrayed in Doctor Who.

An appendix includes an interview with Robert Shearman, with some interesting reflections on the creative process.

The scene which I’m in some ways happiest with, just because I just think it’s got the best bit of writing in it, is the scene where Chris [Eccleston] gets really angry and goes off about van Statten dragging the stars down. That got very nearly cut. After being filmed, Joe Ahearne said to me, ‘You know, I don’t think we need that.’ I said, ‘Could we keep it?’ And he asked why and I said, rather painfully, ‘It’s just the bit I like the most.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, all right.’ I mean, bless his heart because that’s not his job, and you don’t need it. You don’t. But it’s still a scene which, when I watch Dalek, I remember writing that bit and being quite proud of it. I’m really pleased that it survives.

And unusually there is an online supplement, a chapter that didn’t fit into the book, looking at the online extras surrounding the 2005 relaunch in general and Dalek in particular, including a game where you actually play the Dalek trying to escape and finish by exterminating the Doctor!

A solid and interesting piece of analysis which deepened my appreciation for a favourite story. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Web Planet (83) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7) | The Invasion (84)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)

The Hand of Fear (TV, novelisation, Black Archive); also, Eldrad Must Die!; also, Eldrad Must Live!

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I think I missed the first three episodes of The Hand of Fear in October 1976 – I don’t know what would have taken nine-year-old me out of the house on those Saturday weekends, though I note that my grandfather died suddenly the night the second episode was shown, which must have led to some family disruption the following week.

However I vividly remember the fourth episode, with the barren, abandoned planetscape of Kastria, Eldrad shockingly crushed and then transformed from woman to man, and then the abrupt departure of Sarah Jane Smith, after three and a half years in the TARDIS. I enjoyed it a lot at the age of nine, even without having seen the story that got us there.

When I rewatched it in 2008, I wrote:

This may not be the greatest of stories – I rather missed UNIT being able to let the Doctor take control of the quarry and the nuclear plant – but it is still rather fun. In particular, it’s unusual for the Doctor to be so thoroughly hoodwinked by the bad guy (or gal in this case), and I rather liked the setting of Kastria. Of course, everyone remembers this for Sarah’s departure, but I could entirely sympathise with her fury at getting hypnotised yet again (I haven’t counted, but it must have been roughly the fourth time in five stories).

For my Great Rewatch in 2010, I wrote:

The Hand of Fear is two decent but not terribly memorable stories joined together – the first two episodes being the Nunton nuclear plant invaded by an alien, and the second two being the Destiny of Kastria once Eldrad arises. I remember first time around being really shocked by the moment the female Eldrad is apparently crushed to death. Most of the story is however fairly unremarkable; what makes it linger in the memory is of course Sarah Jane’s farewell, scripted on the spot by Baker and Sladen – I found I had something in my eye while watching it.

Maybe I was just in a good mood – if memory serves me right, I watched it on the way home from Oslo – but I enjoyed it a lot this time round. Out of sequence, I did not mind the absence of UNIT so much; I did like the awful horror of the power station, with the director’s tense farewell phone call to his family; and Judith Parris really steals the show as the first version of Eldrad. Having said which, Elisabeth Sladen is on top form here, and Sarah really does get one of the best farewells of any of the classic companions, perhaps only Susan and Jo are in the same league. There’s a nice piece about the story from 2011 in the Guardian.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation is:

Tom Abbott was being surprisingly co-operative. At first the Doctor’s reception had been rather hostile, but his insistence that
no one blamed Abbott for the accident and that Sarah was comparatively unhurt, and above all his production of a set of impressive credentials from some secret Government establishment called UNIT, had all combined to put Abbott in a more friendly frame of mind. He had even agreed to move the old blue police box, in which the Doctor stored his equipment, to a safe part of the quarry, and look after it until the Doctor had time to arrange for its removal.

When I reread it in 2008, I wrote:

A pretty standard retelling of the TV original, without much added or taken away. The story line seemed slightly clearer on paper, but maybe I just was not concentrating sufficiently when I watched it. On the other hand, Dicks does not quite do justice to Sarah Jane’s farewell scene.

I think that’s not quite fair; as the co-creator of the UNIT years, Dicks does add a bit more material to link The Hand of Fear with continuity. But basically this is a book to reassure you that you can re-experience the TV serial, in an age before video recorders. You can get it here.

It did strike me that the cover, by Roy Knipe, has Sarah not in the Andy Pandy suit that she wears on screen, but in what is frankly a much more sensible blue outfit, though with the same red top and headscarf.

Left: book cover (scanned from my own much-loved copy, hence creases); right: TV series

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought; so I went back and re-listened to the 2013 Big Finish story Eldrad Must Die!, which I consumed shortly after its release but never got around to writing up here. It’s by Marc Platt, featuring the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Turlough, and I’m afraid it’s not all that brilliant; poor old Turlough gets possessed as usual, and Stephen Thorne shows up as the male Eldrad and shouts. There’s a nod also to J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World. You can get it here.

More intriguingly, shortly before his death in 2021, Bob Baker (who with Dave Martin wrote the original story) published a sequel, Eldrad Must Live!, through Cutaway Comics, illustrated by Stephen B. Scott, Andrew Orton and Colin Brockhurst. This is the second frame of the third page:

As you can see they’ve caught Glyn Houston’s portrayal of the director rather well. It seems that Eldrad’s traces were not completely removed from the nuclear reactor, with predictable consequences, and a mysterious woman supposedly from the authorities shows up; however I’m afraid that the comic ends in mid-story, promising that it will be picked up in Cutaway Comics’ main sequence of Gods and Monsters; and this has not yet happened as far as I know. But you can get it here. I got only the PDF rather than the physical version, which comes with extras.

Simon Bucher-Jones has produced a really good Black Archive on this story, considering mainly the horror tropes. It’s quite long but has only four chapters.

The first and longest chapter, “Why Are Hands So Significant?”, looks at the history of the hand in art from the stone age onwards, and at the precedents for detached hands in horror films, looking at the obvious Addams Family, The Beast with Five Fingers and Carry On Screaming, but also a 1963 B-Movie called The Crawling Hand which features a detached body part from a spaceship explosion.

The second chapter, “‘Eldrad Must Live’: Three Types of Fear in The Hand of Fear“, points out that the hand itself doesn’t strangle anyone and isn’t bloodied; so why is it scary? Or even, is it scary? Bucher-Jones diverts via the Flixborough disaster to considering the story’s plot structure and how the narrative beats function. He’s not completely certain that it all works, but I’m more confident that it does.

The third chapter, “The Thing from the Aeons: Fossil Horror and The Shadow Out of Time“, looks at how ancient figures coming back to life are treated in Doctor Who, linking Eldrad with Omega, Davros and Rassilon. Its second paragraph is:

We discussed in Chapter 1 why the hand is a potent image in horror and fear, and in Chapter 2 how the ‘idea’ of Eldrad adds or transcends the physicality of that horror, being presented as a dark religion that afflicts and repurposes the mind, but there is a further aspect of the horror in The Hand of Fear in the first episode, which we have not yet touched on.

The fourth chapter, “Gender (and Other) Issues in The Hand of Fear“, briefly considers a) the fact that Judith Parrish’s female Eldrad is much better than Stephen Thorne’s male version; b) how the Hand could have landed relatively undamaged; c) the morality of the Doctor’s disposal of Eldrad; and d) the perfection of the final scene with Sarah’s departure.

An appendix, “Kastria and the Kastrians”, considers the difficulties of locating Kastria and of the Kastrians’ biology.

It’s a rare case among the Black Archives where I think I like the story more than the writer does, but in any case he does a good job and you can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Daleks (82) | The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Web Planet (83) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Massacre (2) | The Ark (81)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7) | The Invasion (84)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31) | Logopolis (76)
5th Doctor: Castrovalva (77) | Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | Mawdryn Undead (80) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Mysterious Planet (79) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | Silver Nemesis (75) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | A Christmas Carol (74) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)
15th Doctor: The Devil’s Chord (78)

The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope; The Androids of Tara, by Terrance Dicks and David Fisher; and a play by Paul Cornell

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David Fisher’s novelisation of his 1978 Doctor Who story, The Androids of Tara, has recently been published in paper form (it had been around as an audiobook for ages). It is a story which draws very strongly on the 1894 novel The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope,so I thought I should go back to the beginning and re-read that as well. The second paragraph of the third chapter of The Prisoner of Zenda is:

I took an early luncheon, and, having bidden my kind entertainers farewell, promising to return to them on my way home, I set out to climb the hill that led to the Castle, and thence to the forest of Zenda. Half an hour’s leisurely walking brought me to the Castle. It had been a fortress in old days, and the ancient keep was still in good preservation and broad moat, which ran all round the old buildings, was a handsome modern chateau, erected by the last king, and now forming the country residence of the Duke of Strelsau. The old and the new portions were connected by a drawbridge, and this indirect mode of access formed the only passage between the old building and the outer world; but leading to the modern chateau there was a broad and handsome avenue. It was an ideal residence: when “Black Michael” desired company, he could dwell in his chateau; if a fit of misanthropy seized him, he had merely to cross the bridge and draw it up after him (it ran on rollers), and nothing short of a regiment and a train of artillery could fetch him out. I went on my way, glad that poor Black Michael, though he could not have the throne or the princess, had, at least, as fine a residence as any prince in Europe.

In case you don’t know, the story concerns one Rudolf Rassendyll, a minor English aristocrat, who visits the central European kingdom of Ruritania only to discover that he is an exact double of the new king. The new king gets drugged and kidnapped by his half-brother, who is scheming to take the throne, and Rudolf is co-opted to pretend to be the monarch, through the coronation, and courting the lovely princess Flavia. There’s lots of exciting sword-fighting and derring-do, especially around the castle of Zenda where the real king is being held, and the half-brother’s henchmen include an evil Belgian. It’s a slightly deeper book than most readers may think, with reflections on dynastic duty and honour, and it’s a cracking good and short read. You can get it here.

I remember hugely enjoying The Androids of Tara when it was first broadcast in later 1978; I would have been eleven. When I came back to it in 2008, having read The Prisoner of Zenda in the meantime, I wrote:

Almost all of The Androids of Tara is basically a lift from The Prisoner of Zenda – Romana actually finds the fourth segment of the Key to Time, the ostensible point of the plot, in the first episode while the Doctor is off fishing. But it is all great fun – Mary Tamm gorgeous as ever in all her parts (ie all her roles), the villainous count yelling “Next time, I shall not be so lenient!”

I noticed that Declan Mulholland, playing the Count’s sidekick Till, did so with a marked Ulster accent. I checked back on his one previous appearance in Doctor Who, in The Sea Devils, but his character is too busy dying in agony to really display much of an accent there.

When I came back to it in 2011 for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

The Androids of Tara is one of the most shamelessly derivative Who stories ever, so obviously ripped off from The Prisoner of Zenda that apparently even some of the lines are the same. But it’s done with great style and affection, with particularly the guest cast enthusiastically in it – most especially Peter Jeffrey’s evil Count Grendel, but the others as well (and a special shout-out for Declan Mulholland’s Ulster/Mummerset accent as Till). In a season where every story is a quest for a segment, it’s refreshing to have the segment found in the first ten minutes and then get on with the planetary intrigue. Mary Tamm doesn’t have to do much as Princess Strella, which again is a sign of the times.

One minor casting point is that this is the last of Cyril Shapps’ four appearances in Doctor Who, playing the Archimandrite this time, and the only occasion on which his character is not killed off.

On reflection, the story’s relationship with The Prisoner of Zenda is a little more complex than I said in either of my previous write-ups. The Doctor and Romana land in the middle of a Zenda-like plot, but take it in some different directions (and some similar). Rather than the central character being the King’s double, it is his sidekick who is the princess’s double; but the doubles double up thanks to the android theme, with Mary Tamm playing four different roles in the end. Several of the set-piece scenes are indeed lifted directly from Anthony Hope, but with variations – the drugged drink combines two slightly different events from the book; K9 intervenes directly to assist both getting into the Pavilion and getting out of the castle. (In fact we see more aggressive action from K9 here than usual.) Contra what is sometimes asserted, I don’t think any of David Fisher’s lines is a direct lift from Anthony Hope. But it is recognisably the same story, rewritten to have the Doctor, Romana, K9 and android duplicates.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation is:

‘Castle Gracht, my dear,’ said Count Grendel proudly. ‘Ancient home of the Grendels of Gracht.’

When I reread this in 2008, I wrote:

Another standard Dicks write-what’s-on-the-screen treatment.

Not much more to say. You can get it here.

It is delightful that we now have Fisher’s own version of the story, filled out in a number of directions. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The reason for this was that Madame Lamia had become interested in the crystal that the stranger had been found with. Lamia had broken two diamond-tipped drills on it and not even scratched the surface. Yet this strange woman, who was the spitting image of Princess Strella, kept insisting it was quartz. But it was like no quartz that Madame Lamia had ever seen. However, her concentration was shattered by the Count’s entrance at full gallop roaring like an angry bull.

As previously mentioned, this is actually the 2022 print version of a 2012 audiobook, slightly adapted for the page (as Steve Cole explains in an endnote). It is thoroughly satisfying. The social structure and recent history of Tara are explained in depth, if still not completely believably, and it’s very clear that the relationship between Count Grendel and his engineer Madame Lamia is sexually as well as economically exploitative. The whole thing feels very much bulked up rather than padded out, and I’m very glad that the BBC asked Fisher to have another go at it before it was too late. You can get it here.

For fun I went and reread Paul Cornell’s sequel, “The Trials of Tara”, which you can find in Decalog 2: Lost Property, a 1995 anthology of short stories which you can get here. I didn’t especially call attention to this story when I first read the book, but it’s an entertaining mashup of the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield returning to Tara to find that things have gone wrong in their absence, with that notorious android, the Candyman, also turning up, and the whole thing told in (more or less) iambic pentameter as a stage script, with elements of pantomime (Benny cross-dresses, the villains are appropriately villainous). The third scene opens as follows:

Scene 3. Another clearing, with TARDIS

Enter the Doctor and Bernice.

Doctor: This is the sweet and charming planet Tara.
Home to android smiths. And nobles.
On which I own a field or two of land
Having earned it. In royal serrvice.
My intent is to visit my old friend
Prince Reynart, and his princess bride Strella,
Who did resemble my friend Romana.

It’s actually really amusing, and I should have paid more attention on first reading it; it was a nice chaser to the three books. I don’t know of any other Taran spinoff fiction.

Facing Fate: Vortex Butterflies, by Nick Abadzis et al

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(This week is going to be all Doctor Who blog posts. You have been warned.)

First and second frames of third part:

I’m getting to the end of the Titan Comics series about the Tenth Doctor, with companions Gabby and Cindy from New York and also Noob, an incarnation of the Osiran deity Anubis; just one more to go after this.

I thought this was rather good; the Doctor leaves his companions in 2009 Willesden, where they befriend Sarah Jane Smith, and they separately explore a kind of meditation on the Doctor / companion relationship, with some lovely art and a couple more cameos from other characters from the TV series. You can get it here.

Sunday reading

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Current
The Girl in the Road, by Monica Byrne
One Foot in Laos, by Dervla Murphy 
The J.R.R. Tolkien Miscellany, by Robert S. Blackham

Last books finished
Dalek, by Billy Sequire
All Things Made New, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Next books
Three Plays, by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
The Hidden Lives of Tudor Women, by Elizabeth Norton

Doctor Who novels, as recommended on LibraryThing and Goodreads, part 2

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See previous post covering the Sarah Jane books, also Class, the three Companions novels, Missing Adventures, Past Doctor Adventures, and the Sixth, Thirteenth, Fifth, Eighth and Twelfth Doctor books.

Seventh Doctor novelisations and New Adventures

The top Seventh Doctor book on Goodreads is the second in the series of 74 New Adventures published by Virgin during the Wilderness Years, starting with Seven and Ace and expanding to include other companions, notably Bernice Summerfield. Timewyrm: Exodus shows veteran Terrance Dicks on especially good form, taking the Doctor and Ace to a Hitler Won timeline in the early 1950s. You can get it here.

The top New Adventure on Goodreads is Paul Cornell’s Human Nature, still the only novel on which a TV adventure for a later Doctor was based. You can get it here.

My own favourite of the New Adventures is the Sherlock Holmes / Cthulhu mashup All-Consuming Fire by Andy Lane. You can get it here.

The top Seventh Doctor novelisation on both LibraryThing and Goodreads is Ben Aaronovitch’s adaptation of his TV story Remembrance of the Daleks. You can get it here. My own favourite is Doctor Who: Dragonfire, by Ian Briggs, which you can get here.

Third Doctor

The top Third Doctor book on LibraryThing is Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Day of the Daleks, definitely one of his better books, in which freedom fighters from the future attempt to infiltrate the present day to cause a strategic assassination. The book was one that I pored over as a kid, and inevitably when I watched the original TV story I was disappointed. You can get it here.

My favourite Third Doctor novelisation is Malcolm Hulke’s treatment of his own script for Jo Grant’s last story, The Green Death, which you can get here.

The top Third Doctor novel on Goodreads is from the BBC’s Past Doctor Adventures, Last of the Gadarene by Mark Gatiss (one of the few people who has both appeared in the show and written for it). It’s a story set in the UNIT era with aliens infiltrating a village fete. You can get it here.

Second Doctor

The top Second Doctor novel on Goodreads is a 2012 book by renowned hard sf author Stephen Baxter, probably the most prominent writer to top any of these individual categories for sole authorship of a novel (but see below for short fiction and joint authorship). The Wheel of Ice takes the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to a human colony in the outer solar system, a classic Troughton-era base under siege, with added marital discord and stroppy teenagers. There are ancient, weird aliens, and a mystery stretching across millions of years, which entirely convince the reader that this is a Stephen Baxter novel. There are also various pleasing references both to Who continuity and to Baxter’s other work, none of them crucial to enjoying the book, which is also probably my favourite Second Doctor book. You can get it here.

(Though I must point out that “The Wearing of the Green” is not a Jacobite tune. Wrong island, and more than half a century out.)

The top Second Doctor book on LibraryThing is the first Troughton-era novelisation published, Doctor Who and the Cybermen, adapting the TV story The Moonbase. I don’t rate it as highly as The Wheel of Ice, but you can get it here.

50th anniversary e-shorts

I have been tweaking these individual categories for each Doctor to look at novels only, because in most cases the numbers are hugely distorted by the short stories published individually and electronically by Puffin in 2013 for the 50th anniversary, many of which are more popular than any of the novels featuring those Doctors. At the top of that list, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is the one that came out the week of the anniversary itself, ten years ago this month – Nothing O’Clock by Neil Gaiman, which takes the Eleventh Doctor and Amy to a creepy house with shades of Coraline and Sandman. I like it a lot too, and you can get it here.

The other one I particularly liked in this sequence was Michael Scott’s Second Doctor story The Nameless City, which nicely salutes the Cthulhu mythos. You can get it here, and you can get a collection of all of the stories (now increased to 13) here.

War Doctor

There is one novel featuring the War Doctor, as played by John Hurt; it is Engines of War by George Mann. I didn’t find it much to my own taste, but you can get it here. The Big Finish War Doctor series is much better.

First Doctor

The first and (IMHO) the best of all the old Target novelisations is also top of both the LibraryThing and Goodreads charts: originally published in 1964 as Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, now generally just known as Doctor Who and the Daleks, the novelisation of the second broadcast Doctor Who TV story, and the one which made the show such a success; later also made into a cinema film starring Peter Cushing.

David Whitaker, who adapted the book from Terry Nation’s script, rewrote it as if it was the very first of the Doctor’s adventures, told entirely from the point of view of Ian Chesterton, a teacher who becomes the Doctor’s companion along with granddaughter Susan and her tutor Barbara. There’s lots of lovely extra detail given to the story of the Daleks and Thals on Skaro, and the Daleks themselves are more interesting than they have often been since. It’s a firm favourite of mine, and you can get it here.

Torchwood

There are 19 original Torchwood novels, and most of them are pretty good. Top of the charts for both LibraryThing and Goodreads is the first in the sequence, Another Life by Peter Anghelides. There is lots of good Torchwood stuff, a body-hopping alien, a spaceship which endangers Cardiff, a former lover of one of the team (Owen in this case), all against a gloomy backdrop of awful weather littered with variously dead bodies. I like it too and you can get it here.

Having said that, my personal favourite of the Torchwood books is the much later First Born by James Goss, who I find one of the best Whoniverse writers currently working. It’s a kind of prequel to Miracle Day, with Gwen and Rhys in hiding, and weird children being weird. You can get it here.

Eleventh Doctor

The top Eleventh Doctor novel on Goodreads is Touched by an Angel, by Jonathan Morris. It is a story of car crashes and mixed-up timelines with the addition of the Weeping Angels, who both create the possibility of temporal paradox and hope to feed off it. Morris does a beautiful job of conveying the history of the relationship between the car crash victim and her husband which is central to the narrative, and the Angels also come across superbly. It also has the Doctor, Rory and Amy. You can get it here.

The top Eleventh Doctor book on LibraryThing is The Silent Stars Go By, by Dan Abnett, which is also my favourite of the original novels, a Christmassy story of a generations-long terraforming plan. You can get it here. But I like Steven Moffat’s novelisation of the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, even more; you can get it here.

Ninth Doctor

The third highest rated Doctor Who book on LibraryThing, and fourth highest on Goodreads, and top Ninth Doctor book on both systems, is Gareth Roberts’ Only Human, which I think benefited from being one of three released in September 2005, when people were starting to get thirsty for new Who material.

It is largely set in Bromley, where the Doctor and Rose get involved with Neanderthals, local homo sapiens, and humans who have travelled there from the far future, all under threat from ambitious monsters and monstrous ambition. Meanwhile, in the early 21st century, Jack Harkness is helping a displaced Neanderthal settle into contemporary Bromley. There is a certain amount of playing the situation for laughs, but also a bit of exploration of what it is that makes us human. You can get it here.

It’s my own favourite Ninth Doctor novel too, and it’s a shame that the author himself has turned out to be an intolerant bigot.

Fourth Doctor

The top Fourth Doctor book by ownership, and second highest of all Doctor Who books, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is another by Gareth Roberts, his 2012 novelisation of the unshown Fourth Doctor TV story Shada from Douglas’ Adams script featuroing the Doctor, Romana, K9 and Cambridge and an ancient Time Lord secret.

I enjoyed it; I wrote at the time that Roberts had teased out threads of narrative left him by Adams, thickened them up and knitted them into a warm colourful and much longer scarf of story. The means and motivation of Skagra and Salyavin are fully explained. In addition, we have the extra romantic depth we had always hoped must be there between Clare and Chris, nicely contrasted with the relationship between the Doctor and Romana. You can get it here.

I must add that I enjoyed even more the novelisation of another Douglas Adams script, The Pirate Planet, this time by James Goss (who is one of my favourite Who writers anyway) which you can get here; and I retain affection for Terrance Dicks’ original novelisation of Genesis of the Daleks, which you can get here, and which is the top traditional novelisation on Goodreads; and his Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster, the top traditional novelisation on LibraryThing, which you can get here.

Tenth Doctor: The Winner

The top Doctor Who book by ownership, on both Goodreads and LibraryThing, is Jacqueline Rayner’s The Stone Rose. It was the very first Tenth Doctor novel to be published, in April 2006 just before the start of Series 2, and was then republished in 2015 which will have given it an extra boost.

It features the Tenth Doctor and Rose with Micky and Jackie, sorting out the mystery of a statue of Rose dating from Roman times in the British Museum. Solving the mystery takes a certain amount of timewarping, mostly during the reign of Hadrian, and dealing with an advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. You can get it here.

My own favourite Tenth Doctor novel is Beautiful Chaos, by Gary Russell, with the Doctor, Donna, Wilf and an old enemy in contemporary London. You can get it here.

Conclusion

I hope that this has been interesting, and will encourage you to look out for more Doctor Who books by more writers. The late great Terrance Dicks has the most books by far on my lists, but I’ll always look out for more by James Goss, Steve Cole, Paul Cornell, Justin Richards and Jacqueline Rayner; and indeed most of the others. The core of Doctor Who will always be TV dramas, but books, audios, games and especially comics (not mentioned here) have a venerable history with the franchise as well. Go, and enjoy them.

Doctor Who novels, as recommended on LibraryThing and Goodreads, part 1

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It may not have escaped your notice that the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who is in a few days. This blog is primarily a book blog, so I’ve done a bit of analysis of which Doctor Who books are particularly well known on the two main online book catalogue sites – LibraryThing and Goodreads. Personally I remain a LibraryThing loyalist, but I have to recognise the reality that Goodreads’ user base is at least an order of magnitude higher. I’ve looked at the statistics of the various series of Doctor Who books on LibraryThing and Goodreads, splitting differences by multiplying together the number of owners of the book registered on LibraryThing, and the number of Goodreads users who have rated it (Goodreads also allows you to see the number of users who say they own the book, but it’s trickier to get to). In a fair number of cases, the same book comes out on top, but there are differences as well, and in every category I’m also giving my own personal favourite, which is usually different again.

A lot of western Whovians are unaware of the full variety of the runs of novels and other written fiction related to the show, but I was struck by how much the New Who books matter to the Chinese fans who I met in Chengdu. Here I’m listing the most obscure categories first, and the most widely owned and rated book of all Doctor Who literature (which is the same on both systems) at the end. What book is that? You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see, because this post got too long for one day…

The Sarah Jane Adventures

The much-missed Elisabeth Sladen starred in three and a half series of the spinoff Sarah Jane Adventures before her untimely death in 2012. The BBC took an interesting approach to linked publications: some of the SJA episodes, especially from the early seasons, were novelised from the scripts; but there were also a number of stories released only as audiobooks, and it is the second one of these, The Glittering Storm by Stephen Cole, that has the top rating on Goodreads and on the two systems combined.

Like most of the Sarah Jane Adventures, it’s about alien intrusions into our world, this time featuring respectable ladies engaging in burglary. It was the second of the audios to come out and must have benefited from marketing to the Goodreads audience demographic. You can get it here, but it’s not my favourite among the audios (which are generally one of the better is least well-known series of Who publications); I recommend The Thirteenth Stone, by Justin Richards, and Deadly Download, by Jason Arnopp.

The most popular of the novelisations on LibraryThing, and on the two systems combined, is the very first, Invasion of the Bane, written by veteran Who writer Terrance Dicks, who was the script editor for the show during the Pertwee years in the early 1970s. It’s a straightforward screen-to-page exercise, with the character who was axed after the pilot episode somewhat underplayed in the book. You can get it here. Often the first in a sequence of books bubbles to the top of reader ratings.

The top novelisation on Goodreads is the last of them, Death of the Doctor, by Gary Russell, which features a guest appearance from Matt Smith’s character and also from Katy Manning’s Jo Grant/Jo Jones. Again, multi-Doctor stories, which this almost is, tend to do well, as we shall see. You can get it here.

My own favourite is the late great Rupert Laight’s novelisation of the first regular episode, Revenge of the Slitheen. You can get it here.

Class

The 2016 spinoff Class, set in Coal Hill school where the show started in 1963 (and where the Twelfth Doctor later worked as a janitor) ran for only eight episodes, but had three spinoff novels as well, and a fair number of Big Finish audios reuniting some or all of the TV cast. Of the three novels, the top-ranked on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is The Stone House, by A.K. Benedict, a fairly straightforward haunted-house story that I think has a slightly better cover than the other two and maybe enjoyed greater sales. You can get it here.

My own favourite of the three was the first, a social media tale called What She Does Next Will Astound You, by James Goss, who is one of my favourite Who writers, always delivering really good quality stories, but has never written for TV. You can get it here. (The third book is Joyride, by Guy Adams. Complete the set if you like.)

The Companions of Doctor Who

Another long-forgotten set of three spinoff books still has more traction than either the Sarah Jane stories or the Class novelisations: they were published in 1986 and 1987, and feature recently departed companions from the TV show without the Doctor. The top novel of the three on LibraryThing, in second place on Goodreads by a hair, is Harry Sullivan’s War by Ian Marter, who as an actor had actually played Harry Sullivan in the first Tom Baker season and wrote a number of novelisations for Doctor Who and other franchises. I wasn’t wowed, but you can get it here.

Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, by Tony Attwood, is a shade ahead of the other two on LibraryThing, probably because it was the first published. Turlough ends up at the centre of a galactic conspiracy where the villain’s name is Rehctaht, which tells you all you need to know. You can get it here.

Surprisingly the novelisation of an actual TV story, K9 and Company by Terence Dudley, fails to score top place on either system; I think it’s much the best of the three, and you can get it here.

Sixth Doctor

The top Sixth Doctor novel on both Goodreads and LibraryThing is one of the BBC-published Past Doctor Adventures from 1999, reissued with a new cover in 2013: Players by the veteran Terrance Dicks. He has the Sixth Doctor and Peri encountering Winston Churchill at various points in his career, with a look-in from the Second Doctor and Jamie. It’s the first of three books by Dicks featuring the Players, the other two being Endgame (Eighth Doctor) and World Game (Second Doctor). You can get it here.

The top Sixth Doctor novelisation on both LibraryThing and Goodreads is also my own favourite Sixth Doctor book, the novelisation of The Two Doctors, by Robert Holmes. You can get it here. If I am not allowed a multi-Doctor story, I’ll take the Telos novella Shell Shock by Simon A. Forward, which you can get here.

Thirteenth Doctor

One of my personal frustrations with the Chibnall era is that little attention was paid to spinoff material beyond the TV programme itself. The last few Doctor Who annuals are by far the least impressive in sixty years. There are a grand total of ten books featuring the Thirteenth Doctor; there are thirty-two featuring the Sixth. She has been the least well served of any of the Doctor’s incarnations.

LibraryThing users, Goodreads users and I myself all agree that the top of the ten is Juno Dawson’s The Good Doctor, in which the Doctor and friends return to a world centuries after their adventure there, to discover that their first visit has become the founding myth of the dominant oppressive religious cult, with Graham remembered as the Doctor, the Doctor herself largely forgotten, and their own past used to justify slavery. It is very well done and packs a lot of action and thought into 227 pages. You can get it here.

Missing Adventures

Virgin published 34 Missing Adventures of Doctor Who between 1994 and 199. These were the first original novels featuring a Doctor other than the current incarnation (at the time Sylverster McCoy’s Seven), during the period when Virgin also had the New Adventures franchise (which we’ll get to in due course). The first published of these is also top by a decent margin on both Goodreads and LibraryThing; Goth Opera by Paul Cornell (who we’ll meet again), a sort of sequel to the Fourth Doctor TV story State of Decay involving the Fifth Doctor, Tegan Nyssa, Romana, vampires and cricket in Australia. You can get it here.

As is often the case, I differ from the conventional wisdom, and my own favourite of the Missing Adventures is Evolution by John Peel, a glorious Victorian romp featuring the young Arthur Conan Doyle and an even younger Rudyard Kipling, combined with affectionate references to Horror of Fang Rock and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. You can get it here.

Fifth Doctor

The top novel on both Goodreads and LibraryThing set during the Fifth Doctor era is one of a number of multi-Doctor stories that will be on this list, Doctor Who: The Five Doctors, Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of the 20th anniversary TV show in 1983 (which he also wrote). In case you have forgotten, the Fifth, Second, Third and an ersatz First Doctor join forces to defeat various baddies on Gallifrey. It was all pulled together rapidly, and if memory serves correctly was actually published before the TV episode was broadcast. You can get it here, and rather cheaper here as part of the new Terrance Dicks collection.

Purists may grumble that they want to know which novel featuring only the Fifth Doctor is top. On Goodreads, it’s the novelisation of his first story, Doctor Who: Castrovalva, by the TV story’s writer Christopher H. Bidmead, which you can get here; on LibraryThing, it’s Goth Opera, already described.

Personally my favourite Fifth Doctor novel is The Sands of Time by Justin Richards, a sequel to Pyramids of Mars with a nod also to Black Orchid. You can get it here.

Eighth Doctor Adventures

The BBC published no less than 73 Eighth Doctor novels between 1996 and 2005, and on Goodreads the most-rated of them is the very first, The Eight Doctors, once again by Terrance Dicks, which sets up the character and new companion Sam for many future adventures. You can get it here. If again you complain that you’re not counting multi-Doctor stories, the next on Gooreads is the second Eighth Doctor novel, Vampire Science by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman, which again brings back the vampires to contemporary San Francisco. You can get it here.

The top Eighth Doctor Adventure on LibraryThing is EarthWorld by Jacqueline Rayner, which features a murderous amusement park, lots of mad alien stuff and entertaining misinterpretations of Earth history. I enjoyed it and you can get it here.

None of the Eighth Doctor novels is a standout favourite for me as with some of the other categories, but I want to call your attention to Escape Velocity by Colin Brake, set largely in Brussels and featuring the Atomium on the front cover; at one point the Doctor and friends run past the building where I worked between 2008 and 2014. You can get it here.

Past Doctor Adventures

At the same time as the BBC were publishing the Eighth Doctor Adventures, they brought out an even longer series of novels featuring the first seven Doctors. Top of these on Goodreads is Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole, taking the First Doctor, Ben and Polly to an asteroid where there is also a sequence of mysterious murders taking place. Cards on the table: I personally didn’t much like this one, but you can get it here.

I liked much more the top novel of this sequence with LibraryThing readers, Festival of Death by Jonathan Morris, which successfully channels the glory days of the Tom Baker / Lalla Ward relationship. You can get it here.

Again, I don’t have a standout favourite from this run, but I’d call your attention to another First Doctor novel and another Fourth Doctor novel. Salvation by Steve Lyons brings the Doctor, Steven and Dodo to New York where they encounter angels and Dodo’s accent gets changed. You can get it here. Eye of Heaven by Jim Mortimore brings the Doctor and Leela to Rapa Nui / Easter Island and asks some interesting questions about colonialism. You can get it here.

Twelfth Doctor

Goodreads and LibraryThing users concur in that the most popular Twelfth Doctor book on both systems is Silhouette, by Justin Richards. His name has already been mentioned, but I want to emphasise that he has written more Doctor Who books than anyone except the late Terrance Dicks, and I think may well overhaul him if given a chance by the BBC. This particular novel is a fun reunion of the Doctor and Clara with the Paternoster Gang (Madam Vastra, Jenny and Strax) investigating a peculiar series of murders. (I’m noticing that this is a trope that pops up more than once in popular Who novels; and indeed TV stories.) You can get it here.

I too enjoyed it, but I’m also going to call your attention to Doctor Who: The Eaters of Light, Rona Munro’s novelisation of her own TV story, which gives the characters and setting (Roman era Scotland, menaced by a transdimensional alien) a lot more detail. You can get it here.

Tomorrow we’ll cover the Seventh, Second, First, Eleventh, Ninth, Fourth and Tenth Doctors, with a side order of Torchwood, the War Doctor and the 50th Anniversary short stories.

Life Ceremony, by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

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Second paragraph of third chapter (English version, haven’t been able to locate the Japanese original):

Yoshiko had just turned seventy-five. She had never had sex and hadn’t kissed anyone either. She had never even once had intercourse with her older husband, who had died five years earlier. Both of their daughters had been conceived by artificial insemination, and she was still a virgin when she became a mother. Both daughters were now married, and she was thoroughly enjoying living alone in the house her husband had left to her.

One of the books submitted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, sadly not eligible as it is not a novel but a baker’s dozen of unconnected short stories, vignettes of life in a series of different worlds which are not quite like ours. The creative use of human body parts, including discreet but socially sanctioned cookery, is a recurrent theme. These are all very weird and disturbing but also memorable, and recommended if you think you can take a bit of body horror. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book by a non-white writer. Next on that list is Fevered Star, by Rebecca Roanhorse.