I seem to be on a number of panels at P-Con this weekend:

Saturday

10:15 Just a Minute Quiz with Paul Cornell, , Leah Moore (moderated by Frank Darcy)
Panellists must speak on a given topic for 60 seconds without hesitation, deviation, or repetition

13:00 Fantastic! The Doctor Who Panel, with Paul Cornell and Colin Greenland, with me moderating (note to self – make sure I have eaten something first).
The enormously successful relaunch of Doctor Who under the microscope, with one of the series’ scriptwriters on hand to give an insight into how it all happened.

17:00 The Sow That Eats Her Own Farrow: How the Book Business is Destroying Itself, with , Ariel, Juliet E McKenna, Bob Neilson, Colin Smythe, and me moderating again.
As bookshops continue to sell more books for less money, and publishers only want guaranteed bestsellers, is the book trade in danger of destroying itself?

Sunday

11:00 Is It About a Bicycle? Flann O’Brien: Ireland’s Master Storyteller, with Leah Moore, Colin Smythe and John W Sexton moderating
Flann O’Brien is Ireland’s most popular writer, according to a recent BBC poll. Now, sales of The Third Policeman have soared after the book appeared in an episode of TV series Lost. Here’s an introduction to his work.

15:00 Awards? We Don’t Need No Steenking Awards!, with Colin Greenland and , and me moderating.
Do awards serve any useful purpose, or are they simply good for the winner’s ego? A few award winners tell it like it is.

I’m glad that and the team have such confidence in my moderating skills! Though I think I will have one or two things to say about the topics in question myself…

See some of you there, perhaps?

gives details of my WorldCon room-mate‘s rise to fame and controversy. Will add other links here as and when I notice them.

Got away, thanks to mother-in-law’s baby-sitting, for 23 hours with my wife to Maastricht, chosen pretty much at random from nearby cities we haven’t really been to.

Verdict: Don’t go on a Monday, when all the famous museums are closed; don’t go while it’s still snowing. Apart from that, it was fine.

Particularly intrigued by the exhibition in the treasury of the church of St Servatius. One fascinating exhibit was a small ivory chest, with a combination lock, made in Sicily (they said) in the twelfth century. The combination for the lock was set on four dials with Arabic letters. Of course at the time the Norman kingdom of Sicily was pretty much at the cutting edge of scientific research in the world (except perhaps China).

While I’ve been away, has been playing the Napoleonic scenario of Civ III and has been dealing with plumbers and fixing radiators, “without even spraining an ovary”.

Almost two months ago,  came up with a meme – to list all the novels which have won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, Tiptree, Dick, Stoker and  World Fantasy Awards and, as so often, bold the ones you have read. It was a pretty short-lived meme; in the next couple of days 34 people did it (all but one on livejournal) and then it died a death as these things do.

I thought it would be intertesting (well, interesting for me, anyway) to crunch through the numbers and see how many people of this self-selected group have actually read each of the award-winners. Excluding the Stoker winners, which seemed to have far less take-up, and the Sidewise Awards, which only one person listed, the results for the other 169 books are as follows (top twenty-ish above the cut tag, and the three which nobody had read below it):

32 (1st): Frank Herbert, Dune

29 (2nd): Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

28 (joint 3rd): Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

27 (5th): J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

26 (joint 6th): Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man
William Gibson, Neuromancer

25 (joint 8th): Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
Larry Niven, Ringworld
Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

24 (joint 12th): Connie Willis, Doomsday Book
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

23 (joint 14th): David Brin, Startide Rising
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

22 (joint 16th): David Brin, The Uplift War
Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

21 (19th): Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

20 (joint 20th): Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep

19 (joint 23rd): Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog
Dan Simmons, Hyperion
Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge
Neil Stephenson, The Diamond Age
Philip José Farmer, To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17

18 (joint 31st): Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves
Kim Stanley Robinson, Blue Mars
Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars
Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar
Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

17 (joint 36th): China Miéville, Perdido Street Station
Gene Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates
Ursula Le Guin, Tehanu

16 (joint 41st): Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds
Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen
Lois McMaster Bujold, Falling Free
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game
Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
Samuel R. Delany, The Einstein Intersection
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

15 (joint 48th): Frederik Pohl, Gateway
Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance
Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake

14 (joint 54th): Gregory Benford, Timescape
John Crowley, Little, Big
Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood

13 (joint 57th): C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station
Clifford Simak, Way Station
James Blish, A Case of Conscience
John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

12 (62nd): M. John Harrison, Light

11 (joint 63rd): C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen
Ellen Kushner, Thomas the Rhymer
Greg Bear, Moving Mars
Patricia McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
Ursula Le Guin, The Other Wind

10 (joint 68th): Colin Greenland, Take Back Plenty
Elizabeth Moon, Speed of Dark
Fritz Leiber, Our Lady of Darkness
Fritz Leiber, The Big Time
Fritz Leiber, The Wanderer
Gwyneth Jones, The White Queen
Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls
Tim Powers, Dinner at Deviant’s Palace

9 (joint 76th): Arthur C. Clarke, The Fountains of Paradise
China Miéville, Iron Council
Frederik Pohl, Man Plus
Gwyneth Jones, Bold as Love
Ian McDonald, King of Morning, Queen of Day
James Morrow, Towing Jehovah
Jeff Noon, Vurt
Joe Haldeman, Forever Peace
John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting
Nicola Griffith, Slow River
Robert Silverberg, A Time of Changes
Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships

8 (joint 88th): Greg Bear, Darwin’s Radio
John M. Ford, Growing Up Weightless
Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon
Tim Powers, Last Call
Vonda N. Mcintyre, The Moon and the Sun

7 (joint 94th): James Morrow, Only Begotten Daughter
Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw
Michael Bishop, No Enemy But Time
Michael Moorcock, Gloriana
Nicola Griffith, Ammonite
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents
Pat Cadigan, Fools
Pat Murphy, The Falling Woman
Paul McAuley, Fairyland
Roger Zelazny, …And Call Me Conrad
Tim Powers, Declare

6 (joint 105th): Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage
Bruce Sterling, Distraction
Christopher Priest, The Prestige
Christopher Priest, The Separation
Elizabeth Hand, Waking the Moon
Geoff Ryman, 253: the Print Remix
Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden
Marge Piercy, Body of Glass
Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward
Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide
Pat Cadigan, Synners
Richard Paul Russo, Ship of Fools

5 (joint 117th): Dan Simmons, Song of Kali
Ken Grimwood, Replay
Matt Ruff, Set This House in Order
Patricia McKillip, Ombria in Shadow
Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids
Rudy Rucker, Software
Stephen Baxter, Vacuum Diagrams

4 (joint 124th): Candas Jane Dorsey, Black Wine
Catherine Asaro, The Quantum Rose
Elizabeth A. Lynn, Watchtower
Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, The Healer’s War
Jack Womack, Elvissey
Nancy Springer, Larque on the Wing
Pat Murphy, Points of Departure
Patrick Suskind, Perfume
Rachel Pollack, Godmother Night
Robert J. Sawyer, The Terminal Experiment
Sean Stewart, Galveston

3 (joint 135th): Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome
Bruce Bethke, Headcrash
Eleanor Arnason, A Woman of the Iron People
George Turner, The Sea and Summer
Gwyneth Jones, Life
Jeffrey Ford, The Physiognomy
Martin Scott, Thraxas
Michael Shea, Nifft the Lean
Peter Straub, Koko
Robert Charles Wilson, Mysterium
Rudy Rucker, Wetware
Tricia Sullivan, Dreaming In Smoke

2 (joint 147th): James Blaylock, Homunculus
Hiromi Goto, The Kappa Child
Graham Joyce, The Facts of Life
Jack Vance, Madouc
Johanna Sinisalo, Not Before Sundown/Troll: A Love Story
Lewis Shiner, Glimpses
Mark Clifton & Frank Riley, They’d Rather be Right
Patricia Geary, Strange Toys
Rachel Pollack, Unquenchable Fire
Richard Paul Russo, Subterranean Gallery
Theodore Roszak, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein

1 (joint 158th): Joe Haldeman, Camouflage
Molly Gloss, Wild Life
Richard Grant, Through the Heart
Richard Matheson, Bid Time Return
Robert R. McCammon, Boy’s Life
Suzy McKee Charnas, The Conqueror’s Child
William Kotzwinkle, Doctor Rat

0 (joint 166th): Carol Emshwiller, The Mount
Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife
Stepan Chapman, The Troika

I confess that I have never heard of either Louise Erdrich or Stepan Chapman, let alone their respective award-winning novels. Howver, I have read the top forty or so. The first I haven’t yet read is China Mountain Zhang, followed by Little, Big and Mythago Wood, and then Thomas the Rhymer and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

That Dune came out on top overall is not so very surprising. I’m pleased by Le Guin’s performance. Slightly surprised that Flowers for Algernon did not do even better – I thought it was a standard high-school assignment (certainly the most-visited page of my own website) but perhaps if you strictly count the novel rather than the original short story the count goes down. Other interesting data there as well, but I have been working on this for long enough.

(Thanks very much to agrumer, apotropaism, badgerbag, blue_condition, http://browriter.blogspot.com, burger_eater, communicator, ellen_fremedon, feyandstrange, firecat, gummitch, hollowpoint, jodawi, jry, kangeiko, katlinel, kerravonsen, ladyoflight2004, lenora_rose, linda_joyce, marykaykare, nhw, nickeyb, pariyal, peake, pigeonhed, sbisson, shsilver, sooguy, spacedoutlooney, tensegrity, tinaconnolly, vierran45 and especially truepenny for putting it into its standard form – user names link to the relevant entry in each case.)

2) Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod

I don’t plan to get into a habit of meta-reviewing, but I have read and here, and here, also ‘s observations, and ‘s praise. I am much more towards the and end of the spectrum. I really liked it. I thought that it does indeed add something new to the old sf theme of first contact between humans and aliens. It takes the premise of Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, a book I really didn’t like at all, and does it a whole lot better – basically, the aliens on their planet have a society which feels much more like ours than do the humans in the approaching spaceship. I thought the various cultures and subcultures, both human and alien, were convincingly fleshed out. (Planets in sf novels are too often portrayed as having just one culture and one language – in extreme cases, appearing to possess a single time zone.) MacLeod is on top form in both depth and humour in his portrayal of the intellectual shock of the encounter for both humans and aliens.

I did feel the novel had one glaring weakness, shared with most of the classics of the hard sf genre to which it clearly belongs. We find out very little about the characters’ inner lives. Much of the human side of the story is conveyed through the blog of a teenage girl, which is frankly much more reminiscent of the author’s own blog than of the real thing at the younger end of livejournal; I guess I must be reading more teenage blogs than Ken does (and I don’t read them much at all). The human characters jump in and out of bed with each other and suffer little emotional embarrassment; as for the aliens, this is the one respect in which we really don’t get inside their heads.

However, it’s going on my Hugo nominations list.

1) Air (or Have not Have), by Geoff Ryman

I mostly agree with Geneva Melzack and Iain Emsley, and where I differ from them I agree with Claude Laumière. This is a great novel about the changes wrought in our world by the new communications technology. Unlike most such novels, rather than fixating on the technology itself, Ryman looks at what the coming information revolution will mean to ordinary people living ordinary lives. Unlike any other such story I have read, his characters are not teenagers living in Western affluence, but villagers in a fictional Central Asian country, at the intersection of the Turkic and Chinese cultural spheres, in other words about as far from the West as you can culturally get in today's world. I thought it was fascinating and compassionate.

However. Ryman is a proponent of the "mundane science fiction" school and oddly enough the two most problematic elements for me in the book for me were the two most fantastic ones. The physical flood threatening to overwhelm the village threatened to be a rather overstated echo of the metaphorical deluge of the new technology, but I think Ryman just about got away with it in the end. The heroine's bizarre pregnancy, however, just did not work for me.

Sky and Telescope’s almanac page (came to it looking for news about the new comet).

The Calls of Cthulhu.

Here.

Turnout 72%, 52036 votes

First round:
Menȝies Campbell 23264, 44.7%
Chris Huhne 16691, 32.1%
Simon Hughes 12081, 23.2%

Second round:
Menȝies Campbell 29697, 57.9%
Chris Huhne 21628, 42.1%

So pretty decisive for Campbell in the end. Could be worse.

(Hughes’ votes split 53% Campbell, 41% Huhne, 6% neither.)

Edited to add – Lib Dem icon borrowed from , if that’s OK.

Even though it’s over ten years since I submitted my Ph D thesis, deadlines still loom large in my life, and I found much to recognise in this article. If you are procrastinating on a postgraduate project, read it. And also if you are procrastinating on any piece of writing at all.

Well, I’ve made my predictions:

Turnout 63% (lower than might have been expected, due to combination of Kennedy nostalgia and difficulty for many punters of telling the candidates apart)

First round:
Menȝies Campbell 39%
Chris Huhne 36%
Simon Hughes 25%

Second round:
Menȝies Campbell 53%
Chris Huhne 47%

Andy Darley has a brilliant post (also here, minus his last entry) on the winners and losers of the campaign – I’m especially glad to see him list Martin Tod and Alex Wilcock among the winners, though a bit surprised that he doesn’t list Simon Hughes among the losers.

Anyone want a free 7-day guest pass to Stratfor? They have sent me three of them.

Just had a note from a Serious Academic Journal who spotted one of my recent reviews and want to publish a cut-down version of it!

From here

Race:
Half-Orcs are often brutish and mean creatures, unaccepted by both thier heritages. They are little better than orcs. But some can be clever and successful in the society of adventurers

Primary Class:
Fighters are the warriors. They use weapons to accomplish their goals. This isn’t to say that they aren’t intelligent, but that they do, in fact, believe that violence is frequently the answer.

Secondary Class:

Alignment:
Law and Chaos:
Law —– XXX (3)
Neutral – X (1)
Chaos — XXXXXXX (7)

Good and Evil:
Good —- XXXX (4)
Neutral – X (1)
Evil —- (-4)

Race:
Human —- XXXXXXXX (8)
Half-Elf – XXXXXXXXX (9)
Elf —— XXXXXXXX (8)
Gnome —- XXXXXX (6)
Halfling – XXXXXX (6)
Dwarf —- XXX (3)
Half-Orc – XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (14)

Class:
Fighter — XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (19)
Barbarian –XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Ranger — XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Monk —– XXXXXXX (7)
Paladin — XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (18)
Cleric — XXXXXXX (7)
Mage —– (-1)
Druid —- XXXXXXXX (8)
Thief —- (-5)
Bard —– (0)

A few weeks back (maybe even a few months back) someone asked me, or else I saw a question posed to the internet at large, about the World SF Writers Conference held by Harry Harrison in Ireland in 1978 and whether there was any information about it on-line.

While looking for something else today, I discovered that John Brosnan’s contemporary write-up of it has been republished here. (Presumably not by Brosnan himself, as the livejournal entry is dated September and he died last April.)

If you asked me the question, sorry for not remembering who you are and replying directly.

[Edited to add: I see the person responsible for putting it online is .]

Along with everyone else, I am dismayed and saddened by the news of Octavia Butler’s death. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a brilliant obituary. (Hat-tip to Bookslut.)

12) 9Tail Fox, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

I very much enjoyed Grimwood’s Ashraf Bey trilogy, though was a little less convinced by either his earlier redRobe or his more recent Stamping Butterflies. I’m glad to report (IMHO) a return to form. Like the Ashraf Bey trilogy this is essentially a police procedural in a somewhat alternative history version of a famous port city with distint sfnal overtones to do with technological brain enhancements. (So we have identified what he does well, then.)

This time the city is San Francisco, however, and the central character is killed on page 30 – only to wake up, like Corwin in Nine Princes in Amber, in a hospital in upstate New York; and he spends the rest of the book solving his own murder. The basic plot has of course been done before, but I love Grimwood’s intense and often sultry writing style; and here he successfully transfers it to a new setting, with memorable characters.

I still had a very slight feeling, after we found the solution to the mystery, that it might not hang together all that well if I inspected it too closely, but the ride was such good fun that I won’t look. I suspect this makes my Hugo shortlist, though am hoping also to read Air, Learning the World, and Never Let Me Go before the deadline. (Already on my list: A Feast For Crows, Anansi Boys, Counting Heads and probably Accelerando.)

A final point – I can’t help noting that this is the second book by JCG featuring a scene with teenagers meeting for the first time in business class on a long-distance flight and spending the journey making out. There is presumably a true story there, waiting to be retold.

11) The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

Classic sf, published in 1952, that had somehow passed me by – I thought I remembered a scene where advertising executives were reassuring young politicians that is is just about possible to make a living as a senator, but it’s not in this book, so I guess I must have read the sequel written by Pohl on his own decades afterwards.

The satirical future setting, in which corporate interests have taken over the world, is a little heavy-handed (“You know the old saying. Power ennobles. Absolute power ennobles absolutely.”) but the basic story of the narrator’s redemption holds pretty well. I thought I picked up a couple of nods in the direction of both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I don’t think you could really recommend this as a “gateway” sf novel but I can see why it is still remembered.

10) Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839, by Frances Anne Kemble

Well, after my grumbling about her latest biography, I thought I should put my theory to the test and dowloaded the shorter of her two works from Project Gutenberg.

And it’s really good. Published in 1863, this is a series of letters from Kemble to her friend E[lizabeth Sedgwick] describing her four months as the wife of a Georgian plantation owner, and going into considerable detail about the living conditions of the slaves. It is horrific stuff, an eloquent argument against slavery, published twenty-five years after the event in a deliberate attempt to undermine British sympathy for the Confederacy in the middle of the Civil War. I haven’t read any of the editorials in the Times that she is reacting to, but I do remember the right-wing British press on apartheid, Northern Ireland, and (more dimly) Rhodesia. Sadly, I have little difficulty in imagining pompous British journalists of the day trying to reassure their readers that slavery was actually a very good deal for the slaves. (It is also a shameful fact, remembered by few, that Irish nationalists of the 1860s sympathised with the Confederacy too, as they sympathised with the Boers at the end of the century.)

Bearing in mind that the author was an actress, I was alert for clues that the letters might have been somewhat revised for publication to put her case in the best possible light. But I ended up doubting that this was the case – there are enough internal repetitions that a good editor would have taken out to ensure a better flow of the narrative. I am sure that she did delete certain more personal details about her husband and daughters, but I feel that otherwise this is pretty much the horrified account of a thirty-year-old woman trying (and ultimately failing) to come to terms with the society she had married into, rather then her fifty-five-year-old self retrospectively justifying it; a famous and glamorous English actress, who had married a rich and charming young American and only gradually come to a realisation of exactly how his family’s fortunes were sustained.

Her very first letter, critiquing a letter from her husband trying to convince her that slavery was all right really, sets forth several of her key political points. For instance, on the education of slaves:

I do not admit the comparison between your slaves and even the lowest class of European free labourers, for the former are allowed the exercise of no faculties but those which they enjoy in common with the brutes that perish. The just comparison is between the slaves and the useful animals to whose level your laws reduce them; and I will acknowledge that the slaves of a kind owner may be as well cared for, and as happy, as the dogs and horses of a merciful master; but the latter condition — i.e. that of happiness — must again depend upon the complete perfection of their moral and mental degradation. [My husband], in his letter, maintains that they are an inferior race, and, compared with the whites, ‘animals, incapable of mental culture and moral improvement:’ to this I can only reply, that if they are incapable of profiting by instruction, I do not see the necessity for laws inflicting heavy penalties on those who offer it to them. If they really are brutish, witless, dull, and devoid of capacity for progress, where lies the danger which is constantly insisted upon of offering them that of which they are incapable. We have no laws forbidding us to teach our dogs and horses as much as they can comprehend; nobody is fined or imprisoned for reasoning upon knowledge, and liberty, to the beasts of the field, for they are incapable of such truths.

She goes on to tackle mixed-race relationships (“amalgamation”):

I am rather surprised at the outbreak of violent disgust which [my husband] indulges in on the subject of amalgamation; as that formed no part of our discussion, and seems to me a curious subject for abstract argument. I should think the intermarrying between blacks and whites a matter to be as little insisted upon if repugnant, as prevented if agreeable to the majority of the two races. At the same time, I cannot help being astonished at the furious and ungoverned execration which all reference to the possibility of a fusion of the races draws down upon those who suggest it; because nobody pretends to deny that, throughout the South, a large proportion of the population is the offspring of white men and coloured women.

At the end of the first letter, she then combines the two themes of mixed-race relationships and education:

Now it appears very evident that there is no law in the white man’s nature which prevents him from making a coloured woman the mother of his children, but there is a law on his statute books forbidding him to make her his wife; and if we are to admit the theory that the mixing of the races is a monstrosity, it seems almost as curious that laws should be enacted to prevent men marrying women towards whom they have an invincible natural repugnance, as that education should by law be prohibited to creatures incapable of receiving it.

And finishes with a dig at her husband, and a flourish on behalf of her own country:

As for the exhortation with which [my husband] closes his letter, that I will not ‘go down to my husband’s plantation prejudiced against what I am to find there,’ I know not well how to answer it. Assuredly I am going prejudiced against slavery, for I am an Englishwoman, in whom the absence of such a prejudice would be disgraceful.

The rest of the book confirms that slavery was every bit as awful as one might have thought, going into what livejournal users would call TMI about the female slaves’ gynaecological problems (I’m frankly stunned that she was able to publish this kind of thing in the 1860s, in England or America) and other questions of diet, hygiene, education, religion, and (in one memorable passage) fleas:

There is one among various drawbacks to the comfort and pleasure of our intercourse with these coloured ‘men and brethren,’ at least in their slave condition, which certainly exercises my fortitude not a little, — the swarms of fleas that cohabit with these sable dependants of ours are — well — incredible; moreover they are by no means the only or most objectionable companions one borrows from them, and I never go to the infirmary, where I not unfrequently am requested to look at very dirty limbs and bodies in very dirty draperies, without coming away with a strong inclination to throw myself into the water, and my clothes into the fire, which last would be expensive. I do not suppose that these hateful consequences of dirt and disorder are worse here than among the poor and neglected human creatures who swarm in the lower parts of European cities; but my call to visit them has never been such as that which constrains me to go daily among these poor people, and although on one or two occasions I have penetrated into fearfully foul and filthy abodes of misery in London, I have never rendered the same personal services to their inhabitants that I do to [my husband]’s slaves, and so have not incurred the same amount of entomological inconvenience.

That phrase, “entomological inconvenience”, is just superb, isn’t it? It pulls together the language of polite society and scientific discourse with the horrid squalor of the life of the poor, especially the enslaved.

Finally, she decides to leave, but to try and leave something good behind her at least as regards one particular slave:

I certainly intend to teach Aleck to read. I certainly won’t tell [my husband] anything about it. I’ll leave him to find it out, as slaves, and servants and children, and all oppressed, and ignorant, and uneducated and unprincipled people do; then, if he forbids me I can stop — perhaps before then the lad may have learnt his letters. I begin to perceive one most admirable circumstance in this slavery: you are absolute on your own plantation. No slaves’ testimony avails against you, and no white testimony exists but such as you choose to admit. Some owners have a fancy for maiming their slaves, some brand them, some pull out their teeth, some shoot them a little here and there (all details gathered from advertisements of runaway slaves in southern papers); now they do all this on their plantations, where nobody comes to see, and I’ll teach Aleck to read, for nobody is here to see, at least nobody whose seeing I mind; and I’ll teach every other creature that wants to learn.

Alas, this is a very brief up-tick in her mood. Much more typical is a letter where she writes of the slaves coming to beg her intercession on their behalf with her husband for clemency, including this horrendous story:

Another of my visitors had a still more dismal story to tell; her name was Die; she had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead; she had had four miscarriages, one had been caused by falling down with a very heavy burthen on her head, and one from having her arms strained up to be lashed. I asked her what she meant by having her arms tied up; she said their hands were first tied together, sometimes by the wrists, and sometimes, which was worse, by the thumbs, and they were then drawn up to a tree or post, so as almost to swing them off the ground, and then their clothes rolled round their waist, and a man with a cow-hide stands and stripes them. I give you the woman’s words; she did not speak of this as of anything strange, unusual or especially horrid and abominable; and when I said, ‘Did they do that to you when you were with child?’ she simply replied, ‘Yes, missis.’ And to all this I listen — I, an English woman, the wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I cannot say, ‘That thing shall not be done again; that cruel shame and villany shall never be known here again.’ I gave the woman meat and flannel, which were what she came to ask for, and remained choking with indignation and grief long after they had all left me to my most bitter thoughts.

I went out to try and walk off some of the weight of horror and depression which I am beginning to feel daily more and more, surrounded by all this misery and degradation that I can neither help nor hinder.

I leave her with this conclusion, actually from one of the earlier letters, in conversation with one of the local dignitaries:

Thank heavens there were people like her prepared to bear witness to what slavery actually meant. There’s much more here (and so little of it touched in the woeful Jenkins biography), but I must finish for tonight.

One last thought. I find it difficult to sympathise with her husband; but one thing I did pick up between the lines of the biography was this. Fanny Kemble made her name as Juliet, and that is presumably who Pierce Butler thought he was marrying, as a Romeo from the other side of the Atlantic. But from her teenage years, her favourite Shakespeare character had been not Juliet, but Portia, who symbolised for Fanny the virtues of feminine assertiveness but also a thirst for justice and mercy. It is good that she got to live out her ideals; it is unfortunate that her husband does not seem to have bothered to inquire what they were before they married.

What we did this morning.

9) The Einstein Intersection, by Samuel R. Delany

Nebula winner from way back. I quite liked this at first, with the re-telling of the Orpheus and other myths very reminiscent of Zelazny's This Immortal and of Anderson's "Goat Song" which must have been writen at almost the same time. But it got a bit rambling and disjointed at the end. Also any author who inserts bits of his own writing journal into the text is just showing off. I'm rather surprised that this beat both Zelazny's Lord of Light and Silverberg's Thorns, but then I have often been surprised by Nebula winners. (The other two nominees were Chthon by Piers Anthony, which I haven't read, and The Eskimo Invasion by Hayden Howard, who I haven't even heard of.)

OK, six Nebula winners left to read.

List now out. I said what I thought of the short fiction in greater detail here.

Novels

Air, by Geoff Ryman
Camouflage, by Joe Haldeman
Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
Polaris, by Jack McDevitt
Orphans of Chaos, by John C. Wright

I have no intention of reading the Haldeman, McDevitt or Wright unless they win. I bought Air last week, and have read both Going Postal and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. No particularly strong feelings; I would quite like it if Pratchett wins in recognition of his general achievements in the genre, though this is not his absolute best book, but I will not be at all surprised if Susannah Clarke makes the double (indeed triple counting the World Fantasy Award).

Novellas

“Clay’s Pride”, by Bud Sparhawk
“Identity Theft”, by Robert J. Sawyer
“Left of the Dial”, by Paul Witcover
“Magic for Beginners”, by Kelly Link
“The Tribes of Bela”, by Albert Cowdrey

As long as the dreadful Sparhawk story doesn’t win, I’m happy enough. I imagine the smart money must be on Kelly Link. (Interesting that no extra stories have been added to the list.)

Novelettes

“The Faery Handbag”, by Kelly Link
“Flat Diane”, by Daniel Abraham
“Men are Trouble”, by Jim Kelly
“Nirvana High”, by Eileen Gunn and Leslie What
“The People of Sand and Slag”, by Paolo Bacigalupi

“The Faery Handbag” was on the Short Story preliminary list and has been moved here. I like it best; the only one of the others I really liked was “Men Are Trouble”. Slightly surprised not to see Cory Doctorow’s story make it.

Short Stories

“Born-Again”, by K.D. Wentworth
“The End of the World as We Know It”, by Dale Bailey
“I Live With You”, by Carol Emshwiller
“My Mother, Dancing”, by Nancy Kress
“Singing Down My Sister” [sic, presumably “Singing My Sister Down”], by Margo Lanagan
“Still Life With Boobs”, by Anne Harris
“There’s a Hole in the City”, by Richard Bowes

I liked the Bailey, Harris and Bowes stories, and didn’t quite get the Emshwiller or Kress ones; the Wentworth story seemed pretty silly to me. raves about the Lanagan story (in fairness, a lot of other people do, he’s just the first to come to mind) so I hope this will mean it is put on-line so I can read it!

After numerous rounds of “We don’t know if Osama is still alive”, Osama himself decided to send George Bush a letter in his own handwriting to let him know he was still in the game.

Bush opened the letter and it appeared to contain a single line of coded message:

370HSSV-0773H

Bush was baffled, so he emailed it to Condi Rice. Condi and her aides had no clue either, so they sent it to the FBI. No one could solve it at the FBI so it went to the CIA, then to the NSA. With no clue as to its meaning they eventually asked Britain’s MI-6 for help. Within a minute MI-6 cabled the White House with this reply:

“Tell the President he’s holding the message upside down.”

My Personal Dna Report

From: X
Sent: 23 February 2006 12:12
To: Nicholas Whyte
Subject: Application

As some of you know, I like to give out free career advice from time to time. (Often unsolicited; I hope not too often unwelcome.) I’m also in the position where I get a fair few people just emailing me their CV’s and asking if I had a suitable opening; to which the answer is usually no (literally once, in my almost four years here, has the right CV hit my desk just at the moment when I really needed to hire someone with those qualifications).

Got one this week which struck me as peculiar even by the variable standards of such things; a Scandinavian woman of about my age who said she wanted to move to Brussels, whose CV was full of decent enough academic credentials but not in any relevant field. I sent her a pretty brusque reply,

You don’t appear to have any expertise (or indeed interest) in international politics in the area where we work, so I think I must recommend that you try elsewhere.

She has now sent me a reply saying,

Indeed it has been very difficult to find an entrance/platform into the field of international relations/politics/diplomacy, but it is my main interest and subject. Often they require several years of work experience etc. and therefore it seems to be impossible to start somewhere, and often it is about unpaid traineeships.

Well, if that’s true, it would have helped if she had said so in her original covering letter, which instead looked as if she perhaps wanted to move to Brussels to be with her partner and was just randomly firing out CV’s and found my contact details somewhere (they are not difficult to find). I will send another more detailed reply now, giving my usual tips about how to get started in international relations (election observation being the easiest first step to take) and recommending that she be a bit clearer in future applications about what exactly she wants and why she is bothering to apply.

Edited to add: Exchanged a couple more emails with her during the course of the day, and it rapidly became apparent that she was simply not interested in my advice. If that’s her attitude to getting free tips from a moderately senior professional in the field, I’m not surprised that nobody will hire her.

8) Fanny Kemble: The Reluctant Celebrity, by Rebecca Jenkins

I got interested in Fanny Kemble after reading The Last Journey of William Huskisson last summer. In that rather clunky historical book, her uncluttered prose was a breath of fresh air. Amazon revealed that this biography had recently been written about her, and I spotted it and bought it in Vienna airport this morning.

I’ve given up. I was perturbed to realise that I had got half-way through the book and she was still only 20 years old; only when I looked at the author’s website just now did I realise that this is in fact just the first of two volumes. There is almost no hint anywhere on the dustjacket that the book takes us only through the first thirty years of her life (her theatrical career and the early years of her disastrous marriage), leaving the other fifty yet to come. I feel cheated and angry.

I wouldn’t mind if it was a good book; but it isn’t. It is a simple summary of Fanny Kemble’s own memoirs, with a vague attempt to throw in some historical context here and there, and the author’s own rambling speculations as to the motives of Kemble and her relatives. The editing is uneven; the text repetitive; and the footnotes absolutely absurd on occasion – example:

In the summer, when the Covent Garden season was finished, it was Charles Kemble’s habit to travel to Paris to scout the French theatres for suitable plays to transfer to his stage.*

* The first decades of the nineteenth century suffered from a total lack of decent British playwrights. So English managers would hop over the Channel to Paris to seek out the best French material to translate and adapt for the London stage.

Truly horrible. A competent editor (indeed, a competent sixteen-year-old student) would have rewritten it pretty easily as a single sentence with no footnote necessary. There are many more like that.

On the few occasions that Jenkins (who it turns out is the daughter of the former Bishop of Durham) allows us to hear Kemble’s voice, the vastly better quality of her subject’s writing style (and her welcome self-deprecation and humour, a startling contrast to Jenkins’ treatment of her) really shines through:

When I went to bed last night I sat by my open window, looking at the moon and thinking of my social duties, and then scribbled endless doggerel in a highly Byronic mood to deliver my mind upon the subject, after which, feeling amazingly better, I went to bed and slept profoundly, satisfied that I had given “society” a death-blow.

It reads like the kind of person whose livejournal entries I would find entertaining.

I think to get to know Fanny Kemble properly I’ll have to actually just buy her own books (or download them from Project Gutenberg), and cut out the middle-woman. Or else look out for a shorter, better, biography by someone else.

7) Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Well, it’s a step towards my reading resolutions. Good, wholesome stuff, so wholesome that I really really need to read some Lovecraft/Alcott crossover fiction. What eldritch lore was Mr Brooke so fascinated by? What did the girls really have in their picnic baskets? What did Amy discover when she fell through the ice? Enquiring minds want to know…

My only two close encounters with this book before I read it were, first, Edward Eager’s classic The Time Garden, in which some children from the late 1950s go back almost a century and have an afternoon with the March girls; and second, the attempts of Sandi Toksvig on the BBC’s Big Read to persuade us to vote for it. Since it is one of the widely recognised classics of English literature, I went out and bought a Penguin edition combining Little Women, Good Wives and an extensive critical apparatus of endnotes and editorial preface; and bounced pretty much straight off it.

Anne reminded me that we also had a copy of hers in the house, and indeed it turned out to be one she had been awarded as a school prize when she was ten; a battered old Puffin edition, with illustrations by Shirley Hughes. Somehow I found this much more approachable; it was much easier to keep the characters of the girls sorted out with the visual reminder that they were all different sizes.

So I read it – it’s easy enough going – and I can see why people like a novel of well-drawn mainly female characters, of a family under stress. But I found it all really too wholesome for me – I almost cheered when Meg drank too much champagne and got hungover, but that is the closest we get to debauchery. I was complaining the other day about authors who stretch me too much; I’m afraid this didn’t really stretch me enough.

Doing BBC World live at 1730 British time (1830 European, dunno when in the US but in about an hour and a half anyway).

Of course, the day I get to do a live TV interview is also the day I forgot to shave before coming into the office. Right, where can I find a razor…

ETA: Well, it’s been cancelled, for reasons the Beeb are somewhat embarrassed about, but I am too gentlemanly to go into detail about them here…